Volume 3 - Issue 4

TheNewJournal Volume three, n umber four I ~ovember 9, 1969

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Comment: Bringing us together, keeping us apart, saying farewell to the end of an era ... and some greetings from fair old Harvard.

Volume three, number four November 9, 1969 Contents 3

Are our schools really preparing us?

by G~org~ Richmond

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Yale Graffiti

by Mike Deasy Seymour Melman: fighting the establishment on its own terms

by George Kannar

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Editors: Herman Hong Paul Goldberger Business Manager: Steve Thomas Art Director: Nicki Kalish Chief Photographer

Peter M. C. Choy Advertising Manager: Robert Kirkman Copy Editors: Richard Caples Stuart Klawans Craig Slutzker Assistant Editors: George Kannar Charles Draper Jeffrey Pollock Edward Landler Circulation Managers: John Callaway Tom Davidson Contributing Editors: Susan Braudy David Freeman Mopsy Strange Kennedy Lawrence Lasker Jonathan Lear Michael Lerner LeoRibuffo Walter Wagoner Staff:

Richard Conniff, J ack Friedman, Joanne Lawless, William Palmer, Manuel Perez, James Rosenzweig, Barbara Rich.

THIRD CLASS NON-PROFIT PERMIT: Third Class Non-Profit postage PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published

by The New Joumal at Yale, Inc. 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520, and is printed at The Carl Purington Rollins Printing-Office of the Yale University Press in New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year and distributed by qualified controlled circulation to the Yale Community.

For all others, subscriptions are $7 .SO per year ($4.50 for students) and newstand copies 50¢.

The New Journal © copyright 1969 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation.

Credits:

Peter M. C. Choy: pages 6, 8, 11 David Schorr: Cover, page 3

Designs in the sky

New Haven's finest

Kerouac

Chris Argyris was playing the devil's advocate. The skywriting of a large peace sign over the Boston Common on Moratorium Day, said the professor of administrative sciences, actually served to polarize those who saw it, not to unite them.

Marvin Torffield, a Yale artist now about to embark on an experiment with skywriting as an art form, saw it otherwise. "We are too isolated, too separated in the urban environment," be said. "We don't have enough collective experiences."

Torffield's idea is to make large skywriting designs over urban areas, thus aiding residents in establishing the sense of community their cities so lack. He presented his plans at a seminar for invited guests from the Yale community one evening last week. The scene was the Art and Architecture Building conference room, so it looked like it was going to be pretty formal. But Torffield and Argyris clashed anyway.

"It's not unfair for a citizen to ask, 'What do you want to do with my sky and my community?' " said Argyris. "Is that sort of Woodstock closeness that y6u're trying to establish here necessarily good over a long period of time?"

"The individual isn't strong enough to face all tha~ is fighting him in his environment and still attain a closeness," retorted Torffield.

But whether making designs in the sky was the right way to start bringing people together was never quite established, and most of those present remained skeptical.

"Are you looking for bow to get a welfare mother in New Haven to feel a common bond with a welfare admirustrator?" one guest asked Torffield. "Well, the way sure as hell isn't skywriting."

Wayne Mansfield, the skywriting pilot who created the peace sign over the Boston Common and inscribed a similar one over the Woodstock Music Festival last summer, was a lso present, and gave a down-to-earth explanation of skywriting.

"I felt pretty good about making those peace signs, and having 100,000 people below all looking up together because of me," he said. Mansfield explained that the line of smoke that forms skywriting letters is three hundred feet in diameter, and the average letter is about three-quarters of a mile long. Many designs run as long as fifteen miles through the sky. Torffield likes that large size. One of his planned projects is an outline of thirteen-mile long Manhattan Island, which he plans to have written in New Jersey and float gently across the Hudson River to come into place right above Manhattan.

Many of those attending Torffield's presentation were not antagonistic toward skywriting itself-they just felt it was irrelevant to the real problem of bringing unity to a community. "To inject skywriting into the problems of the world is like playing court jester," said one student on his way out.

Torffield hopes to counteract skywriting's image as an advertising device by creating shapes and forms, rather than words, in the sky. But here too, he ran up against opposition. Someone suggested a butterfly: "That would surely bring us closer."

"No," someone else said. "It would make us think that someone was selling butterflies."

It was not that we sought to withdraw into that privileged sanctuary of Yale when we moved fifteen feet down College Street and onto Yale property after the police had told us to move. We were removing ourselves to a place where we thought we had a right to be.

The four of us had been talking on College Street about community control of education, of commercial facilities, and of the police when the New Haven police arrived.

"Get moving there or we'll put you under arrest!'

Since our discussion had just gotten us to that precise point where the viability of the American Constitution was questioned, I responded, choosing for the sake of discussion to defend the system.

"Why? We live right here," pointing to the Old Campus. Three of us indeed did live on the Old Campus, and we were having a conversation on what was virtually our front stoop. So that when one officer repeated, "Look, you punks, you're on a public sidewalk and when we tell you to move, you move," we thought it quite reasonable to step off the sidewalk and onto the Yale campus. I pointed out to the gentlemen that we were no longer on the public sidewalk.

By this time, the two policemen bad left their squad car; three of us had paused farther down the street while one, more radical than the rest of us, was still walking down the sidewalk shouting back to us, "Okay, stick up for your constitutional rights and see where they'll get you."

Another one of us walked over to the police and explained that we were Yale students simply holding a discussion and that we lived on the Old Campus. We're clearing the Green tonight, they answered, and Yale students are no exception.

"But we're not on the Green."

"Are those your steps?" asked the cop pointing to old, unused steps at Welsh Hall.

"Well, no, not exactly."

"Then you're loitering. Do you want me to spell it? L-0-I-T-E-R-1-N-G." He flicked on the radio and began speaking to headquarters. Both policemen approached and asked us to step down onto the sidewalk. We were under arrest. Unwilling to be arrested, I politely declined and suggested they talk to the campus police.

"We don't need any campus police. If you don't come down, we'll drag you down." " Do you have a warrant?"

But the police wagon had already continued on page 15

Quite Lowell, Mass., Friday morning, clear cold, clean, workaday Lowell with deserted textile mill, biggest, emptiest building in the world behind St. Jean Baptiste ("He went about doing good") Catholic c)1urcb, grey on the outside but saintly cavernous on the inside, marble cupola alter, saint glass windows-half the wealth of dying Lowell exhibited at JacJc Kerouac's original and final church.

Groups of two and three pea--coated college gurus and would-be saints leaning and sitting across the street at a boardedup drug store before entering the church, thinking Lowell and not understanding at all ... "This town, it meant so much to him...."

Where was Dr. Sax, chthonic saint of Kerouac's beautiful childhood, whos~ shadowy Basil Rathbone essenc~ lurked and haunted him on Fall ni'ghts? Fall nights. October. Kerouac's favorite month.

Month of long cold walks from Maggi~ Cassidy's house, walks of sweet-sick adolescent love ... French Canadian high school innocenc~ and wond~ring . ..

Octob~r nights later in misty Southern Pacific freight train yards . .. October nights of Wolfean Manhattan discovery walks . .. October nights of warm Florida loneliness, drunk~nness and death.

WHDH News crew, Channel Five Boston, stationed in front of the church, their cameras recording the more colorful attenders of the Beatnik writer's funeral.

But they have to scramble; the crowd is somber and dull. Relatives, readers, neighbors, and poets Corso, Orlovsky, Ferlinghetti. And Ginsberg a pall bearer with boyhood friends of Kerouac's.

The casket is rolled to the front of the aisle and solemn Requiem Mass begins with the uncertain, uorosaried congregation standing and sitting only on direction of the priest who reads from Revelations: "Write the things which thou hast seen and the things which are, and the things that shall be hereafter." Then he tells bow Kerouac had come to them in his youth for advice, encouragement and comfort, then left Lowell to chronicle himself for others, living among "the mad ones, mad to talk, mad to live, desirous of everything at the same time," and finally returning to share the visions of Gerard, his nine-year-old brother who died when Kerouac was four.

Kerouac spoke of other visions in his books ("A Ill write about is Jesus''); shrouded desert figures always following.

To him a reminder of some lost bliss of the womb, never exp~rienced again till death.

H~ told Neal Cassady about this and "because w~'re all of us never in /if~ again, h~ rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I (Kerouac) agreed with him then."

But later h~ ~nvisioned death as eternal peace and fr~edom ... I

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wish I was free

Of that slaving meat whul

And safe in heaven dead.

And now he was. Followed out to the hearse by the hundred and fifty who hadn't half-filled the church. Somebody dropped a toothbrush in the aisle, Gregory Corso was taking movies on the church steps, and Peter Orlovsky waved at some acquaintances while police untangled traffic for the procession to graveside.

Bryan Di Salvatore

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31 The New Journal I November 9, 1969 ...

Our schools are more than bad; they are incompatible with the very structure of our society.

by George Richmond The right to self-determination is denied to three groups in this country: convicts, the insane and students. Membership in any one of these groups carries with it a suspension of legal and property rights, and a precedent of subservience contrary to the intentions of the Constitution. While the curtailment of the legal and property rights of convicts and the insane is dangerous to all who seek the protection of the Bill of Rights, the abatement of law, of justice and of ownership as applied to the student population poses an even more serious threat.

Our you.t h are the inheritors of both our wealth and our democratic traditions.

Neither will remain safe if we continue to school our young through a system that so totally ignores both their legal and their property rights.

From our educational system, it would seem as though our children were being prepared for a propertyless state, whose laws are legislated and administered by a despot. Selected from among a group of card-carrying civil servants, the despotthe teacher-is a vestige of the form of colonialism that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. He is the inheritor of the "white man's burden" and he is equally unwilling to allow the natives to govern. That public schools offer no practical, experiential education in governance and in the economic or legal enterprise that is so vital to the "American system" is remarkable in a society so imbued with the ideology of capitalism and democracy as is the United States.

George Richmond '66, Director of the Transitional Year Program at Yale, has devised an entire curriculum bast!d on the use of play money and game theory for use in urban schools. An experiment with his system during this past summer was the subject of a major article in New York magazine last September. Besides being an educator, Mr. Richmond is also an accomplished artist.

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The reality of the school is at variance with the ideology expressed in our traditions and vocalized as the "national interest." Few ownership experiences are available to children via the school. All the resources of the classroom-the desks, the chairs, the blackboards, the paper, the books and other school materials-are the property of the state. Teachers preach an ethos of sharing, of equal opportunity, and of an equal division of wealth that is surprisingly unfaithful to reality. If a child brings a sweet to school, he is under strong pressure to distribute a portion of his treasure to his peers. Student sale of goods and services within the school building is discouraged where it is not met with strict prohibition.

Only the teacher can sell cookies, but even here the profits go to the state.

These are hardly the principles that form the underpinnings of a capitalist state.

Even the dominant economic institutions of our society are absent in our schools. Which of us has ever encountered a marketplace in a school? Yet the marketplace is central to the efficient functioning of our economy. Similarly, the absence of a marketplace in our schools implies an absence of tutoring in the behavior of markets, and, in fact, this is the case. Most of the students who graduate from public school systems are frozen out of the economy both in terms of what they have to offer to the labor market, and in terms of their understanding of the market economy.

There are two ways for poor children to acquire property. The quickest way is to steal it, and this manner of acquisition is widely practiced, in various forms: extortion, confidence games, pickpocketing, etc. One student from a New York high school reported that the football team in his school made a regular practice of collecting loot from the gymnasium lockers since they had access to the lock combi~ations. When students uncovered the thieves, the football team threatened the discoverers with physical harm if they exposed the thefts.

The second way to acquire property is to barter one item for another or to sell goods for currency. In a sense, the teacher demonstrates a barter economy as he trades grades and privileges for cooperation and other forms of reciprocation.

The exchange of an item for currency, however, is infrequent, since students, by and large, have only indirect access to legitimate sources of funds. One exception to the otherwise primitive economic activity in the schools is the recent development of a drug market within the urban high school. Within this market sellers, buyers and middlemen are easily distinguished while profits are reaped at every level of the distribution ladder. The medium of exchange is U.S. currency.

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Do our schools, then, intentionally foster an economic system contrary to the expressed ideology of the society for which it is preparing its students? It would seem so, although the paradox is not as acute as it would seem at first glance.

There are clear reasons for the refusal to practice the system that is preached.

Commercial barons have not been traditionally concerned with the creation of other commercial barons. They are interested in instructing their future labor force in areas and habits which will increase individual productivity and sustain the factory owner as a wealth owner.

Moreover, to suggest that large num.bers of the economically disenfranchised should be informed in the subtleties of marketplace behavior is to make the mistake of taking capitalism at its word. Tutoring the common man in rudimentary financial practices would turn the exploited into the exploiters while simultaneously equipping poor people with the knowledge they need to calculate the liabilities of the market system they enter.

The absence of practical education in economics is contrary to the basic premises of a capitalist society within a democratic setting. We are producing high-school graduates who have had no systematic instruction in the rationale of the world in which they live. They fail to understand the market economy; they are unable to conceive of the abstract idea of investment, the power of money to earn money.

Public schools fail to prepare students to earn income or to preserve the wealth they do manage to obtain. What economic experience is available is generated from the ruthless environment of the street with its thieves, hustlers and prostitutes and from its drug merchants who cruise school corridors. If student experience in economics is limited to illicit activities, then the school's structure reinforces the extra-legal behavior and systematically destroys his respect for law.

The administrative hierarchy of a school has much in common with government, but many of its judicial practices seem designed to warp the student experience with law and with governance. The legal system of the school appears to be at odds with the avowed purpose of socializing the student so he can function in a democratic society. What public school student has been guaranteed due process when a member of the official hierarchy has lodged a complaint against him?

Does the student stand trial before a randomly selected group of peers, or before a group whose membership in the ruling elite convinces itself that leniency on any one count precedes the total breakdown of the school's social order? In which schools are students, who must defend themselves against the charges of illegal behavior, actually confronted by their accusors? Can anyone remember an occasion when a student has been permitted to ask witnesses to appear in his defense? Do we even allow student defendants an understanding of their rights and privileges before the law?

Few if¡ any measures are taken to insure the fairness of officials who judge student offenders. Processes unthinkable in even the most conservative courtrooms are standard procedure in the most liberal schools. And if we turn the coin over, and imagine the administrators of the school legal system subject to the identical process applied to students, we immediately see that school-law is a one-way street.

Teachers are above the legal system, and it is nearly impossible for a student to even lodge charges against a member of the faculty. There are no precedents for fair hearings of disputes between student and teacher when the action is brought by the student; law is synonomous with the "establishment" in the school.

The impartial administration of justice is fundamental to the ideology of democracy, but our school systems fail to employ acceptable standards of justice within their spheres of influence, and neglect to follow by example what they preach. The absence of impartial panels leads to a system of presumed student guilt in all conflicts between students and teachers. One of the most disturbing aspects of school judicial process is the utter absence of the right of the accused to a trial. He is often judged secretly, and notations are added indiscriminately to his permanent file. Even the common criminal has better protection under democratic law than children do in their schools.

As it happens, circumstantial evidence is sufficient for conviction of an alleged offender, and students are frequently tried for their associations with the "bad crowd" rather than for particular offenses.

The permanent file which records the transgressions of students against duly constituted authority, is identical in purpose with the state's usage of the criminal record; both records follow the offender as written history throughout his association with societal institutions.

The permanent file eventually becomes the possession of the school guidance counselor who uses the information therein to write an otherwise anonymous recommendation to the college the student hopes to attend. It follows that the student who allows himself to be embroiled in controversies or protests against the indignities of his educational environment stands a poor chance of entering a highly selective college.

If the school's limitations on student communication and mobility are combined with the added restrictions on his legal rights and the irrelevance of the curriculum and educational structure to his ultimate professional and economic goals, we begin to recognize a form of government consistent not with democracy but with corporatist and oligarchic ideologies. The Constitution says that the citizen has the "right to be free of searches and seizures," yet searches and seizures of personal property are a common occurrence in the school. The denials of student rights extend to other articles of the U.S. Constitution. Press censor¡ ship, prohibitions against assembly, the regulation of speech, denial of right to petition for redress of grievances are commonplace in our schools and are becoming more and more frequent as the student protest movement filters down to the public school level. The principles in the Constitution granting and limiting power, which are designed to prevent the depositing of unlimited aut!,lority in the hands of the government, are absent in the process we call education.

It is remarkable that the agent for the perpetuation of the hallowed traditions and institutions of the United States should itself so lack these qualities.

The components of our system of educational coercion are derived from state compulsory education laws. In saying this, I do not mean, of course, to suggest that the system of coercion can be overhauled by the simple abrogation of a handful of statutes. But still, compulsory education laws have done much to turn our schools into custodial institutions, and have added to the confusion of purpose which diminishes the viability of the educational offerings. Schools have been asked to perform the dual role of stimulator of the educational demand and supplier of educational services, which is unfortunate because ideally the students themselves should stimulate the demand. This is not a healthy relationship, since it leaves the institutions unaccountable to anyone but themselves, and permits their student populations to be captive markets with no influence over the supply of goods offered to them.

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TheNewJournal The publication at Yale that matters.

What is the significance of this type of school system? When students do not know why they are in school, and are not consulted about their own goals, they see no purpose in the curriculum offerings, and their presence becomes counterproductive to the attempted learning activities.

Instead of concentrating on irrelevant and often boring academic work, those who reject course offerings create for themselves a political and social life inside the classroom that is far more interesting than the fare forced on them for consumption. The dynamics of this "extra-curricular" life can be described as war between the social factions within the school, or, stated in a more rhetorical way, as a miniature class struggle.

This class struggle becomes the real curriculum of the school. It pits five groups against one another: the administration, the faculty, and three student factionsthe "monitors," or students who cooperate with the existing system and perform the tasks it requires; the "mafiosini," or students who refuse to cooperate with the totalitarian classroom state and become discipline problems instead; and the passive students, who are caught between the approved hierarchy of the monitors and the underworld of the mafiosini. The passive student does not rebel against the school; he accepts it, but he must live out his days dealing with both extreme power groups if he is to survive.

The struggle between these groups is the result of many social forces outside the school, of course, as well as the actual system within the classroom. But it is highly certain that the struggle would take a markedly different form were our school systems not dictatorial institutions of coercion.

Coercion in urban schools begins with the requirement of compulsory attendance, which is a curious inversion of the historical intent of state legislation on the subject. This legislation, which enabled every citizen to be educated at state expense, was considered the great equalizer in its time, since it prevented parents from sending their children into factories instead of to school. But times have changed, and what was progressive in Horace Mann's era may have become oppressive in our own. Student confinement has forced schools to develop programs to satisfy those who wish to involve themselves in activities outside the academic program. The academic curricuJum of the school is a compromise incorporating the wishes of those who are content with those who are alienated.

In the process of pleasing such divergent interests it debases the integrity of its programs by planning for the median student and sacrificing both the bright and the dull to its standardized fare.

Forced attendance implies, furthermore, that the student would not be willing to seek out an education, and from this implication are derived others which are fundamental elements of a despotic, custodial regime. As this regime matures, it is only natural that it begins to prescribe in detail, minute regulations for the efficient running of its society. In turn, these regulations must be enforced, implying the need for a penal code associating offenses with penalties.

This sedimentary process, years of creating a nd amending legal and penal codes, consumes the major energies of personnel within the school. The "class war" becomes the hidden curriculum that teachers unwillingly teach, and that students willingly learn.

Nothing instructs so effectively or as systematically as the structure of the school. The medium is the message; curriculum developers who insist on devoting effort to improve lesson plans and to apply instructional technology face ceaseless frustration, for what they are tinkering with is only peripheral to the problem. Changing the academic curriculum misses the point, for the primary deficiency of our schools is in structure, not in content. It is the structure, the structure so inconsistent with the stated goals of democracy, that creates the "class war" which students so eagerly engage in at the expense of learning. And who can blame them? Even the most extraordinary innovations in curriculum content are weak in contrast to the dynamics of a structural process.

It is so much more exciting to play the power game in school than to read the books.

But if the cancer of public education is located within the medium itself, then change is possible-insofar as educators can replace the present custodial structure with one that will instruct our children in the real economic, political and social spheres. In short, schools must be reflections of the present, rather than the remnants of a feudal era. ~

Some people read The New Journal because it has the best in-depth reporting, criticism, profiles and essays published at Yale. Others read it because it says more about what's really happening to Yale and New Haven than any other publication.

And others read it because ifs good.

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61 The New Journal ! November 9, 1969

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71 The New Journal I November 9, 1969 "

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This is an anthology of Yale writing first and a compendium of libelous claims and offensive pornography second. Time did not allow the author to pore over the hundreds of desk tops in Yale classrooms where a virtually untapped resource for future graffiti research is to be found. In all cases the original diction, grammar, and punctuation has been preserved. The author's gratitude extends to the anonymous and unsung creative spirits at Yale whose tireless efforts in restrooms have made this article possible.

Unlike ambiguity there are eight types of graffiti: Doggerel, punning, dialectic mimesis, caricature, parody, directives, memorials and obscenity.

This last is unfortunately the most familia r type. In Cannibals and Christians, however, Norman Mailer observes that "some of the best prose in America is graffiti found on men's room walls." While Mailer would not have slighted women's rooms had he visited Yale's School of Art and Architecture, he is shrewd to point out that with the rise of the educated and professional-and thus repressedclasses, more sophisticated and sublimated forms of graffiti have sprung up in San Francisco pubs, Manhattan office buildings and a t colleges across the country.

The Yale community, for example, can luxuriate in such doggerel as this found in the Freshman Buttery:

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In the Fuzz Once I was Now lam But are you fit To be full of shit Forever seek the proper hole or resign yourself a mole It will seep If you beep Porforapeep 'Quizonimpeep While you sleep And as you keep As one of the sheep Rememberopeep The past tense of rape Is . . . . reep Or in this dialectic mimicry from the Art and Architecture Building: A Amelia Earhardt is alive and well selling girdles in Macy's basement.

B That's strange, you don't look Jewish C I don't smoke D Neither does Judge Crater look Argentinian.

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Or such directives as "Pray for Piece" and " Fantasy must be fulfilled." One could say that graffiti writing itself is fantasy-fulfilling.

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Mike Deasy, an M.A. candidate in City Planning, is president of the new Student Community Housing Corporation in New Haven.

Freud in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious describes parody and travesty as that comic attempt to destroy "the unity that exists between people's character as we know them and their speeches and action, by replacing either the exalted figures or their utterances by inferior ones." Yale restrooms abound with this type of graffito. Once again the Art and A rchitecture Building demonstrates this: Jesus was a haploid A What would Marshall Mcluhan write on this wall?

B Nothing unless he was paid C Nothing, he can't write But the most devasting travesty of all: A Donald Duck is a lesbian B AQuack The array of Yale graffiti defies categorization. The form, content, quantity and level of perception vary with school and department. This would suggest that even graffiti are susceptible to sociological analysis even though humanists undoubtedly would rebel at reducing man to his anonymous mural outbursts, and social scientists would quake to scrutinize the subjective and random evidence occasioned by alimental evacuation. What scholar could submit the following to content analysis? whereat wear a hat chew the fat rat-tat-tat Dirty rat Have a Chat Brand New Hat Here I sat Dont Stand Pat Skin the Cat Go to Pratt MTARRARAT EMPTOR CAVEAT What zealots wash away, anthropologists should hold dear for the study of contemporary society. The humblest artifacts are often the most revealing, and the commonest graffito could reveal the deepest unconscious of an entire society. "The joke, it can be said, is the contribution made to the comic from the realm of the unconscious," writes Freud. If graffiti, like dreams, are really the condensed formats for societal wishes, then the freshman who wrote on the Durfee Buttery walls "God is alive and living in terror" could be said to have made a reflection upon the over-awed state of mind upon leaving the fishbowl and entering the ocean.

A. W. Read, a scholar from Columbia University, remarks that "a sociologist does not refuse to study certain criminals on the ground that they are too dastardly; surely a student of language is even less warranted in refusing to consider certain four letter words because they are too 'nasty' or too 'dirty'."

It is clear that graffiti wa rrant more study both as to their genesis and to their use as social indicators.

A Why should the bathroom be such a vessel for repressed sexual feeling?

B Queer you should bring that up.

Indeed the response to this question is not accurate. Hopefully, graffiti demonstrate more than what is queer, but rather the inner thoughts, unconscious wishes and repressed feelings of a broad spectrum of society. When a law student or professor writes in the Sterling law Building basement, "Where can I find a good whorehouse?" he is expressing virtually the same sentiment as "Virginity is like a bubble" when written by the scientist in the Kline Chemistry men's room or the sentiment, "love me that I may fuck you with a pure heart" when w r itten in the Freshman Buttery. And yet the form varies from the logica l, to the analogical, to the idealistically exhortatory of the undergraduate. No such sentiment has been written yet on the walls of the Hall of Graduate Studies. The form is consistent from school to school with other sentiment as well. Thus, one expects the walls of the law School johns to speak clearly but not always forthrightly: A B C D E F G H

Montana is a myth law is a myth Yale is a myth (Invocation and application) Sowhat?

(Appraisal) Smart ass law student Nothing is absolute

A Good night, David.

B Good night, Goliath A Une pierre qui roule n'amasse pas de mousse.

B A perambulating lithoidal accrues no lichen.

Undergraduate writing, on the other hand, is expected to be pretentious, extended, self-conscious and often political. Once again, the Freshman Buttery's 1968 edition provides a clue to undergraduate effort: A I'm in love with a girl but I don't know she exists.

B How do you know you don't know?

C How do you know you know you don't know?

D Because, douchebag.

E Self referential problem. (cf Russell's Theory of) A Gametes of the world unite!

B Good people of the earth, leave Yale.

It is 2 AM-I'm starving and the goddam door is locked This graffitii is definitely inferior to the 1971 edition. In fad it sucks.

PATHOLOGICAL EXHIBITIONISM last year the fifth floor of the easternmost Durfee entryway generated what

81 The New Journal I November 9, 1969

most certainly is the distillate of freshman mural writing. Hanging conveniently near the toilet to prevent plagiarism was the pamphlet-sized anthology Graffiti written by Robert Reisner in 1967. It served to insure a healthy originiality and continuous dialogue that recognized itself as participating in an art form: A Mozart is alive and in Haydn.

B Can you Bach that up with a Lizst of facts?

C What a Barbarous question.

D lves shown that the Rameaufications are endless so that I couldn't begin to Janecek it out; be Cagey, or you' ll never un-Ravel it.

Please remain seated while bowels in motion.

Help take symbolism out of sex-it's a rchetypal Writing graffiti standing up is cheating Deeds speak louder than graffiti A Sex is not a cure for loneliness.

B Profound, that Malthus is a spoil sport.

A Psychiatry transcends Marxism B Theology transcends God. Oh yeah, God. C Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Yeah, theology Get ahead-that's where it's at.

Cogito ergo sin.

Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

Go blastulate

Jiggedly, jingle, jaunty, j01unty Joyce Grind groovy at your local group grope Think how lucky the lndi01ns would hilve been if Columbus had filllen over the edge.

Yet another center for undergraduate writing (not to exclude the faculty fellowship) has been the men's room off the Berkeley College common room.

The 1968-1969 edition was entitled 'The Existential Reader': A You can't trick our Dick!

B (A common penis?)

C No, our president You feel such 01 luk of inter01ction and communic01tion with your fellow man that you resort to writing on these walls.

A Purge the walls, we need a new generation of graffiti B Then it seems we are in a generation gap C At least 9 months You write on walls? Do you shit in your notebooks?

A Th01nk god for mixers, when all those girls get frustrated they let it out on our walls B I wish it were on our balls

Gr01ffiti: ink washed by the seas of time (and by the janitor) Dear janitor: you clean the walls OK, try the floors sometime A Classicism: Fuck you B Romanticism: Fuck me C Re alism : Masturbation Although one contributor to the above Berkeley edition protests graffiti as an unsocial act, Freud insists over and over again that jokes....:and graffiti a re a species of jokes-are "the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure." One of the most notorious examples of graffiti communications has accumulated in Hendrie Hall. Despite numerous attempts at whitewashing, good specimens can still be seen.

A I'd walk a mile for a camel B Think how far you'd walk for a woman!

C Oh, I don't know-after all, a umel does have a bigger hump.

D Hell, I'd walk a mile for a hump E Ever try fucking a camel after walk¡ inga mile?

F Ever try walking a mile after fucking a camel?

G What happened to the woman?

Support A,E,I,O,U Start a vowel movement A Boy, Candy was a shitty movie.

B Yeah, Candy was a box orifice smuhl Fuck, why be so subtle The lack of graffiti may be as telling as their presence. The Kline Biology Tower restrooms, the women's rooms of the residential college dining halls; Dwight Hall; the bathrooms of the academic departments except political science, English, history, and Slavic languages; and most bathrooms in the residential colleges-all lack graffiti and betray the character of their users.

(Curiously, Philip Johnson designed excellent walls to induce graffiti writing in the Biology Tower: The restrooms are completely paved with white tile, yet the pristine sterility is respected.)

What is w ritten in the Graduate School tends to be written in quite small and orderly letters. A whole graffito in good compositional form can often be found lurking in an inch-square tile in HGS. The graffiti of scholars are well endowed with literary and philosophical references, such as the English Department's "The thing-in-itself is alive and well in Konigsberg." Although empirical research would show that the thing-in-itself no longer takes strolls in Konigsberg, fiction writing is allowed by English critics in the bathroom where they are free from the constraints of facticity. Fiction is alive in the English Department. In other departments, graffiti writing ranges from the political to the Freudian travesty: USSR = SS Dubcek in 1968

9 1The New Journal I November 9, 1969

A Linguistics is the mother of all sciences.

B or, the science of your mother A texan' s fart- A big, noisy blast of hot air that smells bad and never goes back where it came from.

Quoted from the Anchorage Inter· national Airport Agamemnon

+ Cassandra fuck

A Is life really meaningless?

B No, God love you C Yes ''The crowd is the untruth"-Kierkegaard

Sterling library would be expected to hold the most literate and urbane graffiti, and that expectation is often met: We s Parker is a Communist.

A Wuhington Irving lives B On whose tax money?

Toads ue fattening A Grieveth not You can't take it with you B I'm going to try A Martha Washington wore her hair in a bun B What a predicament Resurrect Necrophilia Where did all the wonderful graffiti go?

Some people have no appreciation for contemporary art forms these days.

•

Beyond any doubt the best graffiti at Yale can be found in the Art and Architecture Building. It is here that the limits of the form are tested, expanded and changed. Graffiti here cannot be said to only arouse titillation o r disgust o r to fulfill unconscious desires. Graffiti at the School of Art and Architecture realize the quest of the artist to fill the mural void. Certain technical developments over the last decade h ave made graffiti as an art form possible: Clear, light-colored t ile t h at has taken the p lace of d ark marble-walled stalls; better bat hrom lighting; but most especially the felt-tipped pen. Color, painterly effects, the variety of line and texture had not been possible before t he felt t ip. Much of the visual a rtistry of the A&A g raffiti cannot translate into written words and should be viewed fi rst hand: zip strip rip chip dip trip hip lip slip cunt bunt punt nip whip blip ship

Humpty Humphrey Had A

Great Fall

So Humpty Humphrey Gets Screwed On this wall

McCarthy felt called to be President His followers cheered his intent But Nixon was quicker and Bobby much slicker So instead of coming he went McCarthy's old car is corroded It's a wonder it hasn' t exploded A You people who write and draw on these walls ought to be ashamed of yourselves. What would Paul Rudolfh think?

B He thinks you can't spell, you schmuck!

C He doesn't think. Do you think he put up these walls?

There are, however, the disgruntled in any subculture who find art either unproductive or too critical: A This is the most insipid graffiti anywhere. It doesn't achieve any positives; it is not obscene or funny or clever or nihilistic or anarchistic or affirmative. It is ve ry dull graffiti.

B Here, here C Neither do you D Since when is dullness a drag E It's not meant to be graffiti- it's fagritti F This is all pathological exhibitionism If protesting is alright Then solving is our duty.

Some of the disgruntled in this case are those in power who have been waging a five year war against the defacing of Paul Rudolph's sculptu red walls. A g raffito explains it best: "There has been an attempt to whitewash the facts. The system hides and trys to ignore what it does not like, FIGHT BACK." Some of the best editions of graffiti have been lost to posterity beneath the layers of whitewash. long before the controversies over financia l equity and the City Planning Department, there had been t he controversy over the bathroom walls. The controversy sprung its quiet furor over the very walls under p rotest: Blue Meanies strike again A Sic transit gloria mundi B Who's she?

C Cousin of Myra Becken ridge A The walls belong to the people.

B OK Let's start all over again, even tho 'twas ever thus!

A The words shall be raised RAZED B Them words shall rise again C My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the words D They have trampled down the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are stored cf John Steinbeck Ill A The paint on these walls merely ex· poses the superficiality of all institutions.

B I think the old graffiti developed organically over the yeus was better.

Much of the wall conversations naturally avert to architecture and its p ractice: A Architecture is?

B Architecture may be frozen music But thank God music isn't melted architecture Kahn·or Kant Genghis Kahn Boredom Bunshaft Ke vin Roach I. M. Pie Frank Lloyd Wrong

Some of the dia logue is quite direc t and sincere: A Gay? Meet me on the corner of . • .

B What if I' m merely happy C Happy? Meet me anyway. I' ll make you gay.

B Why don't all three of us come?

D How about a foursome for more fun?

E Metool F Six for sex G Seven will be heaven H Raise you once and see you A I wrote the original and I think it would be grossly impractical for so large a meeting on a public thoroughfare so we will all meet in the sub-basement @ 8 :00 every night I Where the hell were you?

A My apologie5-will be the re tonight henceforth J There has never been anybody in the sub-basement A ' 'The quality of mercy is not strained."

B No, rather minced and served with sliced radishes. " I piss on you all; and from a consider·

able height!"

-Louis Ferdinand Celina

Much of the dialogue reveals something of a literate background. Have architects w ritten these pieces or visitors to the building who receive inspiration from the bare concrete? Or are these pieces written by that singular soul known as the Fourth Floor Poet?

A I know you all and will uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the earth.

Tis not the lark but the nightingale that Pierceth the hollow of thine ear.

B Tis not the lark but my mono-ocular trouser ferret that Pierceth the hollow of thine quim.

C Quim, an old-fashioned word meaning cunt D The bathroom bard blithe ly bathes in bullshit. .. . But man, proud man

l incoln (865-30 1 5) The fi lm the lady flipped for back by countless requests

I Am Curious Yellow

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Drest in a little brief authority Most ignorant of what he is most assured His glass y essence like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks be fore high heaven A!:. make the ange ls weep.

Stop the population e x plosion Make WAR not LOVE -Catholic Church Support Young Fascists for Christ A Bombing for p e ace is like fucking for virginity B Who gives a fuck for virginity C Me, twice a year

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Gentlemen, Let's get one thing straight once and for all: The policeman isn't the re to create disorde r. The police man is there to preserve disorde r.

- R. Dale y, Aug. 1968 Come sit and cack With lusty back But leave no w rack Beside our closet Void, spurt and p u mp Yourturdous rump But leave no lump He re for deposit He shall shame Who misses aim Le t St. Anthony's flame Burn his scut sear.

Who does not swab His thingumbob All the last blob Ere he leave here A Rabelais B Rabelaid a what?

I pray thee now my good stout lads with handsome pricks held be twixt half-hidden in your bone y heads, pass on in detail all thy truths that w e might be amused in learning. Describe to us in good faith and in good nature and, pray Thee, spare not one horrid tale that ye may know, for the likes of us are wont of better things and better places and any grain of truth that might gleen (sic).

Pray thee now, pen on The quality of female graffiti at Yale has been quite infer ior. But until this year the sample has been quite l imited.

Moreover Kinsey reports that " relatively few females ever make wall inscr iptions. When they do, fewer of the inscriptions are sexual and only a small proportion of the sexual material seems to provide erotic stimulation for the inscribers o r for the persons who observe the inscriptions." How Kinsey obtained this latter conclusion is indeed questionable. Nevertheless, most of the feminine artistry consists in " Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," which appears from Hungry Charley's to Connecticut Hall. The prose is always too flowery and often unintelligible:

Love looks not with the eye, but with the mind and therefore is winged cupid blind

II But miserable most to love unloved This t haw should pity rather than despise P. ..... goden ...perfect divine To what, my love, shall I compare thine eye Thy lips, those kissing cherries tempt¡ ing grow, That pure concealed. . .. .. .. snow. .. . when thou holds up thy hand, and let me kiss this priceless of pure white, this seal of bliss."

Do you always use the toilet Provided .. .

Do you o veruse . . .

Which hand do you use? .. .

Un-Stamp Out graph eaties in The Stalls and on our walls A Why is Miss America irrelevant to young American Wome n 8 Who is rele vant? a human being YOUNG American men Whatever a human being's relationship is to his graffiti has yet to be examined. The subject has evinced little research money. A re g r affit i folk art? Simple communication? Does it have a formal vocabu lary and what are its myths? To measure men by their graffiti may not be truly successful o r fair. As one Yale student wrote at t he end of a sociology paper in good graffiti style, "The reductionistic pitfalls have caused nostalgia to lose its normative st ructure." ~

f

I

111 The New Journal ! November 9, 1969

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Seymour Melman may wear a three-piece suit, but he was fighting the Pentagon before you were.

by George Kannar

Frank talking and straight shooting have always been part of the American selfimage. All good Americans pride themselves in "getting down to business" and "caJiing a spade a spade." All that honesty began to wane, however, about twenty years ago when the United States government decided to abolish the War Department and set up the Department of Defense instead. Though the Department continued to send invading forces all over the world, now they were not in the name of agression, they were for "defense."

And through the 1960's, the progression to greater and greater euphemisms has continued.

Seymour Melman has suggested that the next logical step would be to rename the Department of Defense the Department of Deterrence. It would be much more in line with the Pentagon's current excuse for making war.

Melman was being facetious, of course.

But his misgivings about the American war machine go far deeper than the hypocrisy of its name. Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia and the leader of a Calhoun Collge seminar, is probably the original critic of the nation's military-industrial complex. And as the talk moves away from nomenclature and into guns and bombs, his joking tone becomes dead serious.

Our very concept of defense, Melman believes, is actually a misnomer, for defense as such, be feels, no longer exists.

In the nuclear age it cannot be purchased at any price, not even for an $83 billion annual budget. Furthermore, Melman says, the defense establishment is actually harming the chance for peace through its lust for organizational expansion. The primary way of satisfying that lust is war.

Melman's voice is not as loud as that of some of the more recent outspoken opponents of the defense establishment, but he is no armchair critic either.

Although his objections are the same as those of left-wing politicians and disaffected students, his approach is basicalJy different: he is taking on the militaryindustrial complex on its own terms. He researches his critiques fully and he provides concrete alternatives to present policies, such as his itemized plan for cutting $55 billion from the current military budget.

Melman's suggested budget shows a basic element of his approach to the military-industrial machine. His writings and speeches are low on ideology but high on facts and figures. A fundamentalist old-fashioned patriotism runs through his critique; he opposes the military-industrial machine because it is betraying his vision of what America ought to be, because it is creating a totalitarian atmosphere directly contrary to the officially professed American dream. A "left conservative" like Norman Mailer, Melman wants the nation to steer itself back: to the democratic and humanitarian course it once struggJed to follow.

The Pentagon·s technocratic infrastructure, says Melman, is ruining the United States not only through what he calJs its "Vietnam wars program" but also through the general economic and moral orientation it has created. The costs of this orientation are high, be says, and the benefits none. The nation spends too much time, talent and energy piling up useless military hardware at the expense of everything else. His work: at Columbia has largely centered on determining just what

"everything else" is, and on figuring out how to begin getting some of it.

"I've spent most of my time working on the economic determinants of technology and of alternative ways of doing things," Melman says. ''The alternative theme is an important one to me because you have to have alternatives to present when you argue with the status quo."

Instead of merely stating that the status quo is immoral, Melman says it is stupid, inefficient and costly. And be proves it.

From outward appearances there is no way of telling whose side Melman is on. He clothes his bulky frame in J. Press style elegance, he carries a battered briefcase, and his syntax is straight whiz-kid stuff, at least on the surface. Melman does not talk about setting up a due date for a term paper, he "determines the best means of achieving that objective." He sits in a seminar room as if be were sitting before a Senate subcommittee: back rigid, leaning slightly forward, hands folded on the table with his documents and position papers stacked neatly beside them, looking straight ahead with a suspiciously maniacal beam in his eyes. In precise but not inelegant language, he tears apart the military machine from top to bottom coolly and unhurriedly. With his Cyrus Vancelike granny glasses, Melman comes across as a slightly jowly member of the Kennedy set, a stocky Theodore Sorenson with his mouth fuJI. Melman fits the John Kennedy intellectual style. He looks and talks like the original Kennedy crowd: a cool Ivy league professor, competent and committed, willing to come down from his ivory tower if the nation calls for his skills as an organizer and social manipulator.

But Melman has nothing good to say about the Kennedys and what they did.

They centralized the Pentagon machinery, and they brought in new techniques of data processing to keep track of what they were doing. Time after time McNamara and his band would appear at a press conference or Congressional hearing with charts, diagrams and tables all designed to prove, for example, that there really was light at the end of the Southeast Asian tunnel. Melman's approach is the same. He makes no statements he cannot back up with the appropriate statistics. Only he is proving that what sounds reasonable is true-not that what sounds cra.z y is true. He talks about reality, not think-tank scenarios.

One of the first to realize that the whizkid technocratic extravaganza was a put-on, Melman tried to warn the then Senator John Kennedy of the disastrous consequences of the ideas which his "expert" advisers were advancing so skillfully. Needless to say, the warning went unheeded. " I began to see what was coming with that Harvard-MIT axis. I was outraged.

They thought they knew all the answers.

It was real arrogance. They thought they had a monopoly on the brains, the money and the organization. They thought military power was the main way of solving international problems.

"I was outraged and frightened, and I turned my hand to oppose them. Even if there were no institutions, even though there was no money. still I had two hands and a pen, so I decided to use them;• and his career as a professional voice of common sense was underway.

One of his first targets was that part of

. )

The merchants of death have been replaced by the merchants of absurdity, Melman says.

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the Kennedy mystique which passed for "realism." Realism meant you had to look at things as they were, assign a fairly precise weight to each of the factors in a problem, and then make the decision which seemed best for the national interest by adding and substracting the pros and cons. It did not matter if international law fell by the wayside, as in the Bay of Pigs, or if the entire American nation was misled with the myth of a missile gap. Operating under this logic of "realism," the U.S. resumed the arms race at a steadily increasing pace, pumping billions into the Pentagon and taking the country further and further away from sanity until it now has an antiballistic missile system so stupid that Melman, a founder and director of SANE, hardly even talks about it.

Melman has been hounding that fivesided mega building on the Potomac River since 1957, when he first began to investigate American military policy as editor of Inspection for Disarmament, a collection of essays proving the reliability of instrumental inspection systems for nuclear testing.

His first real explosion in the capital came in 1963, however, with the publication of A Strategy for American Security.

Senators, Congressmen and private citizens outraged at the fraud of ICBM buildup under the Kennedy administration read Melman's critique and so swamped the Department of Defense with letters that it took $100,000 to write answers to them all.

A Strategy for American Security made two simple and obvious points whose existence the Pentagon refl,lsed to acknowledge: that there is no defense against nuclear attack for either side, and that no matter how much wallop a nation packs it cannot kill someone more than once. Melman's frontal attack on the inherent irrationality of the "overkill" theory that was so strongly supported by Robert McNamara and other Kennedy advisers launched him into the Washington circuit. He visited more than half of the Senators and Congressmen in an effort to put across his views.

The merchants of death have been replaced in the postwar era by the merchants of absurdity, he told them.

H erman Kahn and other Strangelove-ish minds at the Hudson Institute , Rand Corporation, Institute of Defense Analysis and MIT churn out theory after theory "proving" the necessity of an overkill capacity for national "defense." Taking a more concrete approach to the same problem of national self-preservation, Seymour Melman, the owlish-looking professor who also knows his technology, says it is all hogwash.

If you cannot buy defense you just cannot buy it; there is no sense spending countless billions paying for something you can never obtain, Melman insists. The problem with our budget is that no one realizes that technology has changed the country's economic and military prospects. " During World War II this country enjoyed guns and butter to a degree never seen before. There was no discovery of a limit to the capacity of the industrial system. Military production under government supervision meant boom, even

though we were just using capacity that had lain idle duri ng the Depression. There seemed to be something in it for everybody. That is the state of mind that got the postwar defense establishment going. " In the early fifties something happened.

A group of men high in the government decided that the United States ought to be spending about ten per cent of its Gross National Product on defense. There was no conspiracy, no plot. Such terms never entered the analysis at all. It was a conscious judgment by a group of serious men with the Congress and the public wmingly complying with the recommendations they made. The vast military machine did not just arise.lt was planned."

Organization, as well as national psychological orientation, has made the military-industrial network what it is. By working under conventional principles of "efficiency," says Melman, the Pentagon has now gained effective control over its suppliers and the Congress, and, through its stronghold on new technology, on the future of the nation. It monopolizes talent to such an extent that the society is left without any alternatives.

"A decision to produce is a decision among alternatives," says Melman. "When you decide what you are going to produce, you also decide what you are not going to produce.

"We had a conference at Columbia in I 965 on the priorities problem. In fact we invented the priorities problem. Until then it was the common wisdom that the United States could do anything. Only since 1965 has it become clear to everyone that we can only do so much."

In his 1965 book, Our Depleted Society, Melman details the economic, social, and moral costs of the national obsession with increasing the stock of military hardware, although "it no longer even m akes military sense." Just as the poor are hidden in the vast wealth of the United States, so, Melman argues, the weakness of our system is camouflaged by a high Gross National Product. Melman wants to know just what is being produced, and he asks whether growth is an accurate reflection of the progress of a society-whether all growth is necessarily good. Our Depleted Society came out just about the time Lyndon Johnson announced the first major buildup of troops in South Vietnam, just about the time that little internal conflict was labeled a war of agression from the North. No one paid much attention to Melman's warning, but the facts of depletion are there. " From one half to two thirds of all the skilled engineers in this nation worked for NASA, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission. It was the ¡ prestige thing, the national interest thing, to do. The nation was in danger, they told us. What else could you do? Besides there were good salaries and fast promotion.

The defense industries were skyrocketing.

Elsewhere industry and technology were slowly grinding along if they were not, in fact, actually standing still.

"I remember one time when I went to see McNamara. I told him all the things the country is missing: good transportation, new technology for mass produced housing, effective means of cleaning the

WI

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131 The New Journal I November 9, 1969

The Alpine Haus

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In a sense, Melman says, the military industrial system is producing in America the conditions of a backward country.

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air. He said , 'Well, why don't we get working on it?' I said, 'The people and the money just aren't there.' He said, 'Where are they?' I said, 'You've got them.'

McNamara blew his stack, but he could not change the facts. He did have them.

"The critical element in an industrial society is the supply of skilled manpower.

The number of skilled people and the number of people who can be trained at any one time is finite. The money spent for military research-which makes up more than half of all research and development expenditures for everything in the whole country-is unavailable for improving the New H aven Railroad."

Melman, who says he tries hard not to be paranoid, attributes this depletion to Sputnik, which started the space race, and to Robert McNamara, who converted the Department of Defense into a highly centralized and immensely powerful military-industrial machine. Before the Kennedy team took over in 1961 the military-industrial complex was just that, a complex, a loose web of governmental procurement agencies and private industrial firm s. But Robert McNamara and his Wunderkinder changed all that, acording to Melman. They tightened up the organization, and, for all practical purposes, made the private firms into mere subsidiary arms of the Department of Defense.

In the new "State Management," as he calls the Department of Defense, orders come down from the top and are obeyed below. The dependent firms have nowhere else to go with their products. They have to sell them to the D epartment of D efense or not at all.

The device which brought about this centralization was the Defense Supply Agency. McNamara replaced the various service procurement agencies with a single department-wide buyer. Everyone who wanted to sell something had to deal with the same people in the government. It no longer paid to play off one service against the other.

The Department of Defense exercises a startling degree of control over its suppliers, says Melman. It can dictate salaries and wages, as well as materials.

It not only sets quality requirements, but also procures capital for the firms to work with. The capital, $83 billion of it this year, comes from Congress. Melman sees the defense budget as an $83 billion leech on the body economic.

"Military expenditures are parasitic.

Military growth is parasitic. The difference is that goods and services that are functionally productive are either part of the standard of living or are useful for further production. Parasitic developments are things that are not part of living or producing....

"A s for the so-called spin-off effects of military research ... you don't do something best by doing something else.

You do something best by doing it. Sure, we get some benefits from military research, but we would get them a lot more quickly and efficiently if we went out looking for them instead of getting them as by-products of some useless Department of Defense or NASA project.''

The Vietnam war clearly qualifies as the

most useless of all useless Department of Defense projects, and Melman caught on to what was happening there before most other people did. A signer of the pamphlet "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," later used as evidence of conspiracy in the trial of the Boston Five, he also personally warned MeN amara in 1965 about what was going to happen in Vietnam, only to receive a confident reply to the effect that Melman did not know what he was talking about. He describes looking at the grinning McNamara sitting serenely in his office beneath a portrait of the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal (who killed himself by jumping from the window of a mental institution), as "one of the few truly terrifying moments of my life."

According to Melman, the militaryindustrial machine gets away with all the legal and moral atrocities of Vietnam largely because it just has more resources at its disposal than anyone else. No one can stand up to it. It is twice the size of General Motors; it spends ten times as much as the Department of State on foreign policy research. In the name of "security" the Department of Defense can hire millions of technologists to spin out plans for different contingencies. The Pentagon even has a detailed contingency plan for American forces to fight their way through South Vietnamese troops to reach debarcation points in case of a sudden United States withdrawal.

In addition, the Department of D efen se has drawers full of contingency plans for the production of many weapons it does not already have or realistically need. A s a result, when the President wants to pump some money into a sagging econom y, as Kennedy did in the early sixties, he turns to the Department of Defense. The plans are already there; all he has to do is implement them. The other branches of the government simply did not a nd do not have the funds and manpower on hand to draw up similar plans for hospitals, medical schools, libraries or rapid transit systems.

Melman has been busy developing these peaceful contingency plans, working out the conversion of the economy to a nonmilitary economic base. There are, however, too many people dependent for their livelihood on the military-industrial state to permit its easy dismantling.

Something has to be done with all those people, whose number, counting workers in subsidiary industries and their families, Melman estimates is a multiple of eight million. He will publish in February a five volume collection of papers, written mostly by his graduate students at Columbia, suggesting possible ways of carrying out the basic transformation of the economic structure of the United States which would be necessary to stop the war machine once and for all. He hopes the collection will be a starting point for a new national debate on how to avoid a military state.

In a sense, Melman says, the militaryindustrial system is producing in America the conditions of a backward country. '¡One of the big things we point to when we are talking about the underdeveloped nations is their lack of an economic

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infrastructure: they don't have reliable communication, or transportation, or central power. Well, all those conditions occurred in New York City during July and August of 1969. The electrical supply sy;;te:m, Consolidated Edison, just broke down. There was no electricity. Trains and subways were hours late. Telephone service got so bad that firms were taking full-page n.ewspaper ads just to Jet their customers know that they were still in existence.

"In parts of New York the infant mortality rate compares unfavorably with that of several Latin American nations, usually the most notorious spots in that statistic.

"We are not even holding our own any more; we're falling behind."

The argument that all these problems are brought by the nature of modern technology itself leaves Melman cold. In fact he does not even explicitly condemn modern capitalism as one might expect. He just thinks that American capitalism is making its decisions on the basis of outdated criteria. The technology itself, he says, is neutral.

"Two generations have been brought up in the present scene. In their lives, parasitic technology has consistently been portrayed as the important technology.

And as a result many members of these generations identify 'technology' as parasitic military technology. There is a feeling that this is all that technology is, a feeling that technology is a Frankenstein's monster with an initiative of its own. But technology does not have a mind. It does not make decisions. It does not make choices among alternatives. Only man does these things." Only when man changes his social requirements will technology change.

But technology has come to symbolize more than just the particular gadgets we ' use in daily Hfe. The industrial system structures our society in its organizational image: a clear-cut hierarchy with bosses and workers, with some one to tell you what to do or what not to do. The alienation that results comes not only from the technological minutiae of the production system itself but from the social relations which it fosters as well.

Melman recognizes this and concedes that once a certain kind of technology gets going it does build up a momentum, if not initiative, of its own. Technology may have man's social preferences built into it, but after a while it has a hand in determining his social preferences as well. The sex machine advertising of the automobile industry makes this all too clear. Live vicariously in a Pontiac while you poison your children's air.

If the only way to change the technology is to change man's requirements, the hierarchical system of organization would seem to be among the first things to go.

Melman considers the former SDS ideal of participatory democracy as an alternative way of structuring economic production, and perhaps society at large. Until now the argument for participatory decisionmaking has always run aground on the question of the alleged inefficiency of its operation. Critics contend that workers will spend as much time in meetings as they will on the production line. Melman claims that the critics are short-sighted.ln modern industry there are four managers for every ten workers anyway, he says, and the savings in administration overhea'd could offset the loss of work time which

would result from a cooperative, societal · and economic structure.

The implications of Melman's careful and painstakingly executed research are vast; they indicate that there may be a way out if the American people can somehow be persuaded that it is worth a try. Persuading the people is the important part.

"We'll know we're getting somewhere when the day comes that no one can get elected to any office-not even to dog catcher-unless he is against Vietnam and anything like it. Yes, and anything like it.

The Pentagon just churns these things out operationaly. It won't stop by itself. When enough people are against all these wars, the structure of the Department of Defense and the whole set of national priorities will have to change. But as long as Congress supplies the money and soldiers obey their orders they will continue.

"The problem is that tl1e technology of American foreign policy bas changed, but the imagery which accompanies it has not." The professor, who conducts seminars with businessmen all over the country trying to explain the changes in foreign policy, uses the example of the TV western to illustrate the problem.

"Most people still look at international relations with the 'High Noon' model.

They see international affairs as a confrontation between states. In a confrontation between the sheriff and the bad man, it makes a difference whether or not the sheriff is well trained, quick on the draw, and has a good pistol- maybe two pistols (two is better than one, you know). And the sheriff and the bad man face each other and draw, and one of them is killed.

"Well, we're playing the game with nuclear bullets now. And suddenly it no longer matters who shoots first. As soon as a shot is fired-by anyone-the bad man goes up in smoke, the sheriff goes up in smoke, the whole country goes up in smoke."

For ten years Seymour Melman was the lonesome sheriff going out to face the bad military-industrial machine, a lonely but insistent voice crying out in the technological wasteland. Now things are different. Even MIT, that decadent arm of the bankrupt society, is holding conferences on how to convert to a peaceoriented economy; now even the whiz kids care about a conversion. But the whiz kids do not have power any more.

They have been replaced by another administration, another party. Maybe the whiz kids learned a lesson from the last five years, but it no longer matters. Melman is not alone any longer, but that is small consolation as the military-industrial machine grinds on and on.

America's infinite misfortune is that it took Vietnam- where the military-industrial leviathan wastes $400,000, 75 bombs, 150 artillery shells, and countless rounds of small arms fire to kill each poorly equipped VietCong soldier-to make even those few, now powerless, technocrats see the point. What will it take to convince the ones who are now in power? ~

151 The New Journal I November 9, 1969

..

New Haven's finest continued from page 2

...

arrived. One policeman leapt towards us; the other was already pulling. I obliged their efforts.

As we were herded into the paddywagon, we asked what charges were pressed against us.

"Disorderly conduct."

"And on him," said one officer pointing to me, "resisting arrest and abusing."

"Abusing? What does that mean?"

"It means using bad language to a police officer."

"We didn't."

No profanity or insult was used, but that seemed of little import as the rear doors slammed shut in our faces. We sat speechless, facing each other as the truck made its half circuit around the Green, which, through the narrow wagon windows, took on a different demeanor. The entire city did. A hidden driveway leads from Court Street into the bowels of City Hall.

We were driven into a garage. Its door closed.

Four students arrived at the New Haven city jail at approximately 11 :00 PM where booking was made. No mention of bond or right to counsel was made. We were Jed to cells in two's after effecting belt-removal to prevent self-hanging. "Yale students are going to find out that when somebody says move, you move. They're going to find out that some New Haven cops aren't going to stand for the kind of stuff you kids try to pull."

The first cell block was well sprinkled with hippies from the Green. The raid had been effective. Our block had mostly blacks from Haven and James Streets, from Henry and Dixwell. The jail was an unreflective green. And, like most jails, the toilets which are supposed to flush never do. Ours had four strata of urine in it representing prisoners of various pasts.

Seven cigarette butts floated on top. The six by ten foot floor had a large puddle in it, whether from spittle, urine, or sweat it was bard to tell.

I had asked for a telephone, but it was now apparent our hosts wanted us to stay the night.

The jail keeper appeared. "What's your charge again?" He was a young Puerto Rican, socialized by the police and anxious to assert his fiefdom of power.

"Disorderly conduct," I repeated. "And when do we get a telephone?" The keeper, however, obviously enjoying his position, proceeded to show us how the police can control a prisoner by simply tightening the handcuffs. He demonstrated on my wrist by closing the cuffs as hard as he could.

"See, they can hurt if you get rough."

Frank, the other student in the cell, was remarking that jail was not so bad. It was his first experience. "Rather pleasant in a way,like working in a factory for the summer. It.takes patience. The wheels of justice grind exceeding slow so policemen don't come out looking foolish."

An unfamiliar police face walked by, which, at our insistence, produced a telephone. I called a lawyer, well-known enough to police so that he could have us released on our own recognizance. The attorney said we would be out in ten minutes, once be telephoned the desk sergeant. The desk sergeant agreed to this, yet two hours later we were still incarcerated.

So, we took to singing songs, "Here we sit like birds in the wilderness ... " and trying to read the profuse graffiti.

Don't laugh I did it and I came

back here too many times Remember, don't laugh.

The keeper returned to ask, for the second time, bow we liked it in jail. Our neighbor in the adjoining cell, a black, asked when be was getting out and was told "Never."

I asked the keeper if he had been given the use of a phone.

"But he don't get one."

"He has a constitutional right to one."

"No, he doesn't."

"Why is that?"

"He's mental. He tries to bang himself with the phone cord. He's mental retarded." ''That doesn't make any difference; he's stiiJ guaranteed right to counsel," said I in my best liberal voice. ''You can watch him make the phone call if you're afraid of a suicide on your hands."

"But I was told not to. Besides, he don't mind."

We did mind and resorted to calling the Yale police. Two of them arrt\ÂŁed within the half hour, apologizing for the delay: They had not known of our arrest. The proverbial Yale bail fund for students arrested performed its work quickly. We drove ho.me to Phelps Gate in the early morning rain.

Two weeks later the court dropped the collective charge of 'disorderly conduct.'

"These are Yale students, your honor, and have sanction to be at the corner of College and Chapel." We bad requested our lawyer to build his case upon our actions as ordinary citizens acting perfectly within our rights. But the prosecutor evidently ignored our defense, and forgot as well to drop the charge of resisting and abusing against me.

When my lawyer and I returned to City Hall the following month, the arresting officer was sitting in the nearly empty courtroom. The lawyer grimaced, ''The prosecutor said he'd nolle it yesterday."

The cop looked quite harmless in this setting. Looking carefully, I found that he was actually.quite uneasy.

"All he wants is an apology, the cop.

Apologize and you can walk out of here.''

My lawyer.

"I didn't say 'fuck you'. I used no abusive language. How can I apologize?"

"Look, his authority has been questioned. He wants to save face. He was ordered to clear the Green, got himself into a bind with you guys and now he wants a way out."

I spoke to the policeman but did not apologize. He was anxious to accept anything I said.

And so the judge walked in. Once again the prosecutor presented his case.

Perfunctorily he explained that as a student at Yale, an arrest would destroy my career, that I was profoundly apologetic. The judge agreed; my attorney shook my hand; I left, remembering not to laugh.

Mike Deasy

Letter from Cambridge Exhaustion and the reality of reading period and final exams served to check the intense and agonizing self-examination Harvard was forced to undergo after last spring's bust. But anxious administrators and eager radicals were even then looking ahead to the coming academic year with

mixed feelings <Jf apprehension and expectation. Every faction bad its own prediction of what was to follow; all agreed that the turbulence would not end.

But after the first month of the fall semester, it has become apparent that at least for the time being an entirely unexpected return to normalcy bas in fact taken place. This is not to say that the issues and emotions of last April have been forgotten-the endless committee reports and the red-fist posters now sold at the Coop prevent that-but that the sense of community and concern that came out of the confrontation last year bas been scattered.

There seems to be little sense of direction on anybody's part this year. SDswith its endless blood-letting between factions -has lost its position of political dominance, and its meetings attract only a few diehards. There is no such thing as a moderate organization: Young Dems almost voted to disband, and the acronymic student government organizationsSFAC, HUC and HRPC-seem to have disappeared entirely. Into their places have stepped a number of new organizations-the Student Mobilization Committee, the November Action Committee and the Moratorium. October 15th was certainly a success; hardly anyone held or attended classes, and the rally on the Boston Common was the largest in the country. But then, who isn't against the War, and anyway it was a nice day and fun to march.

As early as the fourth day of classes the Administration was served a reminder of times past when the Weathermen disrupted Henry Kissinger's old home, the Center for International Affairs. But the tactics of the disruption were so repugnant and the motives behind it so unclear, that the action was met by universal condemnation. It is likely that the CIA as well as the Cambridge Projecta Defense Department-funded social sciences survey-will continue to be under fire.

What activism there is focuses on the university's role in society and within its own community, and there is hardly any discussion about the actual quality of the education Harvard offers its students.

The Fainsod Committee-set up by the Faculty last winter-recently released its report on the operation of the faculty and the ways students can be brought into the decision-making process, but unfortunately it is remarkable only for its vagueness and statements of the obvious.

Perhaps, as one tutor who was active in the strike has suggested, there is a cyclical pattern of activism and protest, and the pendulum will begin to swing back to where it was last spring. As the memories of summer begin to fade, the initial interest in course work begins to wane and it is no longer possible to lie in the sun on the banks of the Charles, there is bound to be a change in mood.

But what person, as be surveyed the blood-stained Yard last April and thought of the coming year, could have imagined that the next time it would contain shouting students and alerted police would be a panty raid by several hundred freshman on Radcliffe early in the semester.

From "On strike, shut it down" to "Cliffies want sex" and "statutory rape" five months later-and somehow you know Warren Harding would have understood.

Bill Hamilton

Thursday, November 6 Siegal's Hell is for Heroes (1962) Friday, November 7 Rossellini's General Della Rovere (1960) Saturday, November 8 Bunuel's Vlrldlana (1961) shows at 6:30,8:30, and 10:30 p.m.

Tuesday, November 11 Rice's The Flower Thief (1961) Wednesday, November 12 Ford's Rio Grande (1950) Thursday, November 13 Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) Friday, November 14 Hawk's Hatari (1962) Saturday, November 15 Fellini's I Vltelloni ( 1953) shows at 6:30, 8:30, and 10:30 p.m.

Tuesday, November 18 Bresson's Pickpocket (1967) Wednesday, November 19 Ophuls's Caught (1949)

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