Volume 2 - Issue 9

Volume two, number nine I April l3, 1969

HEH

HEH HEH!

21 The New Journal( March 9, 1969

Contents 3

An old soldier returns

by Richard Balzer

5

Bigotry in blue

by Michael Lerner

J0

A searching generation

by George Wald

13

Moynihan's Misunderstanding

by Michael Parenti

Coffin The fervor that prompted 500,000 people to march on the Pentagon last October and stirred such masterpices as Armies of the Night seems somehow drained. The seniors with whom I talked last year about ending the war are now talking about Officers Candidate School.

Yet as people are busy putting everything out of their minds and getting ready to accept the unacceptable as fate, there is one thing that really must not be forgotten.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr. has now been in legal battle for over a year trying to defend the right of free speech in an increasing paranoid country. Exorbitant is not a good word to describe the legal expenses he has incurred. Absurd might be a better word, considering he is paying the cost of defending rights which should go unquestioned anyway.

Coffiin has repeatedly turned down money from the ACLU so that it might go to other members of the Boston Five, who he feels need it more. Recently a number of students have gotten together to form a student compaign to raise money for Coffin. Questions of the war or Coffin's position are almost irrelevant-the real question is free speech.

Hopefully all undergraduates will give generously when they are canvassed. All others who want to give, please send a check made out to: "Students In Support of Coffin" or "SSC'' to 500 Yale Station.

Hiroshima Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry at the Yale Medical School, has recently been awarded the National Book A ward in science for Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, a book first reviewed in the New Journal. The following is his acceptance statement.

I am grateful for this occasion. But Hiroshima permits no awards. It does require, though seldom receives, unflinching recognition. This recognition is important for the survivors of atomic bombing because it conveys to them the sense that their experience has significance for the world and for themselves. But it is even more important for the rest of us. We need Hiroshima to give substance to our terrorhowever inadequately that city can represent what would happen now if thermonuclear weapons were to be used on human populations. As a way of recognizing Hiroshima I shall forward one half of the monetary award to a Special Fund for Survivors; and the other !Jalf, equally divided, to two American groups: The Council for a Livable World, and Physicians for Social Responsibility-groups which refuse to allow us to deceive ourselves about nuclear and biological weapons and insist that we pursue science to promote life, and medicine to promote healing.

Nuclear weapons have already damaged us more than we know. They have created within us an image of historical extinction and caused us to feel severed from both past and future. They also impose upon us every variety of psychic numbing-of emotional and intellectual anesthesia-so that we need not feel and cannot grasp their brutalizing effects upon human beings. This numbing not only interferes with our capacity to cope with the weapons themselves but extends into all of our perceptions of Jiving and dying.

Rather than an age of anxiety, we live in an age of numbing.

StiJJ worse, the weapons create in us an aura of worship. They become grotesque technological deities for a debased religion of nuclearism-gods sought by everybody as part of an all-too-human tendency to confuse the power of apocalyptic destruction with the capacity to protect, or even create, life. We then speak of nuclear stock piles, nuclear arsenals-of a beneficent nuclear umbrella or of an equally beneficent system of Anti-Ballistic Missiles. We perpetuate an illusion of security by means of step-by-step logic; but this is the logic of madness.

Are we inexorably condemned to live out our image of historical extinction-or rather, to die out in accordance with that image? Had I thought so, I would not have attempted to say anything at all about Hiroshima. Both haunting and true is a phrase of Theodore Roethke: "In a dark time the eyes can see." The kind of vision needed for us to keep going as a species includes full confrontation with the weapons themselves: with what they do, cause and mean. Through such Faustian immersion into our particular purgatory, we may be able not only to cleanse ourselves but to understand our predicament and act upon it. Here and there have emerged the beginnings of such a vision: on the part of older generations who have lived through Hiroshima, and younger ones who, without yet focusing upon the specific nature of the weapons, have been trying to tell us that a world dominated by these weapons is not the only kind of world we need have. Hiroshima makes clear that our dilemmas are ultimate ones, that we are equally capable of destroying or renewing ourselves.

Robert Jay Lifton

Miller After two and half years hairdresser James Miller and Professor of Law Steven Duke will be able to relax for a while.

On March 14 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out MiJler's narcotics smuggling conviction on the grounds that the prosecutor should have revealed that his prime witness had been hypnotized prior to the trial.

Miller and Duke may have only enough time to catch their breath, however, since the Justice Department can initiate new proceedings and call for a new trial at any time. The United States Attorney for Connecticut, Jon 0. Newman, who aided in the prosecution of Miller's first trial, won't say that he will seek a new trial, but he won't deny it either.

Although Miller claims that unethical and illegal methods were used by federal agents in their attempts to produce evidence of his guilt, the court maintained confidence in the good faith of US Attorney William Butler, who hypnotized

Michel Caron, the witness, and who later failed to reveal the hypnosis at the time of Miller's trial. The court's view of the case, as expressed in the opinion written

by Circuit Judge Henry Friendly, is at best a grudging admission that unfair methods were used by the government in the prosecution of Miller; in fact, the court looks upon the whole affair as unfortunate rather than tragically misguided.

The court's opinion does not deal with the broader charges Professor Duke raised in the course of his defense: namely, that the government made up its mind in advance to "gang up" on Miller and then set about digging up the evidence necessary to convict him.

Friendly's opinion does not deal with the question of Miller's innocence or guilt either; it merely admits that the hypnosis should have been revealed. In throwing out Miller's conviction Friendly says, "We have reached this conclusion with some reluctance, particularly in light of the considered belief of the able and conscientious district judge-who had lived with this case for years-that review of the record in light of all the defense new-trial motions left him 'convinced of the correctness of the jury's verdict.' We, who also have had no small exposure to the facts, are by no means convinced otherwise.... If the price of our decision should be the ultimate escape of a guilty man rather than the vindication of an innocent one, this is the kind of case where that price is worth paying."

Although Newman doesn't think the case has any broad implication and although Steven Duke says he took the case not to defend any particular legal technicality but to seek the "vindication of an innocent man," still Time magazine, in its cool, holier-than-thou way, managed to glean the truth, mentioning that Friendly's opinion may serve as a basis for future rulings on the use of hypnosis in criminal cases. Friendly does not say that hypnosis should disqualify a witness, and he thinks Caron should be aJlowed to testify at any new trial of MiJier. But he does say that hypnosis may, at least, make a witness's testimony slightly questionable. "Here, then, is a science-if such it can be denominated-which is in a comparative infancy and which, insofar as its use in a court is concerned, is not even on the threshold," Circuit Judge Moore says, mixing his metaphors in a concurring opinion. "In such a pasture what are or should be the ruJes of the game? For courtroom purposes, they have not even been drafted."

On the Frank McGee Report two days after the court handed down its decision, Miller said that the decision, based on a legal technicality, was "only the beginning.

It will take me the rest of my life to clear my name and to remove the stigma of all this.'' Duke is, of course, elated at the decision and says he will stick with the case until the end, whenever that comes.

Although he wishes the press had not been so hostile and so inaccurate all along (he even pointed out a glaring mistake in the short Time piece), he isn't complaining. He agrees with his hairdresser client, who says: "Finally justice has been found.

It was hiding in this case, but now it has been found. Of course I never should have been arrested, but still the sky does look a little bluer and the whole world looks a little brighter."

George Kannar continued on page 14

Volume two, number nine April13, 1969 Editors: Jeffrey Pollock Jonathan Lear Business Manager: Jean-Pierre Jordan Executive Editor: Herman Hong Art Director: Bruce Mcintosh Associate Editor: Lawrence Lasker Assistant Editor: Paul Goldberger Advertising Manager: K. Elia Georgiades Copy Editor: Paul Bennett Photography Editor: Robert Randolph Associate Business Manager: Steve Thomas Circulation Manager: John Adams Contributing Editors: Susan Holahan William L. Kahrl Mopsy S. Kennedy Michael Lerner Leo Rihutfo Staff: Tom Abell, Nita Kalish, Stuart Klawans, Michael David Rose, Deborah Rubin, Scott Simpson, Joel Skidmore, Craig Slutzker, Nancy Vickers, Warner Wada, Michael Waltuch THIRD CLASS NON-PROFIT PERMIT: Third Class Non-Profit postage PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published

by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., 3342 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 $7.50 per year ($4.50 for students) and newstand copies 50¢.

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

Letters welcome. Unsolicited manuscripts should be accompanied by a stamped, selfaddressed envelope. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily those of The New Journal.

Credits: Peter M. C. Choy: page 3 William Crawford: cover, pages 5, 6, 7, 8 Michael David Rose: page 13

3 I The New Journal! April13, 1969

The Law School will never be home again

by Richard Balzer

I went to lunch at the Law School one day in November and heard that Eugene Rostow was returning to teach two courses for the spring term. We talked for a while about how we should welcome him back.

I must admit none of the suggestions were very complimentary. Yet somehow it is April now, Rostow has been back for nearly three months, and there has been little one could point to as a reaction to his return.

Even though some students have continued to talk of boycotting his classes or disrupting them, none of this talk has been turned into action. In fact, the only organized student response to his return has been a Rostow Brothers Film Festival, in which three movies showing Vietnam atrocities and severely attacking American policy were shown. Before the event, all was quiet. It was only afterwards, in a rare moment when Rostow lost his composure and tore down one of the posters, that the stu(lents reacted. A sign was posted imitating the rhetoric of an announcement Dean Pollak had recently posted when the Black Law Students' Union bulletin board had been torn down. It read, It has come to our attention that, during the course of the past few days, certain of the posters announcing the Rostow Brothers Film Festival have been rent from the ivied walls of our ihstitution. Now, while we are secure in our pious belief that no member of the greater Yale Law School Community can have been the perpetrator of this cowardly and craven act of petty and unmitigated hooliganism and vandalism, it is nevertheless incumbent upon us in all our Contemporary Relevance suitably to deplore this attack against the very core of our Democratic Ideals, that JudaeoChristian, Anglo-American Common-Law, one-man-one-vote Constitutional philosophical heritage, which we cherish in our hearts and foster in our studies. It 1s earnestly urged that cooler heads will prevail in this potentially critical time and that no one group, neither first-year class nor faculty, will take the Law into its own hands, thereby sullying and polluting its righteousness and debasing itself to that nadir reached by those contemptuous and meddlesome outside agitating wretches, who have so recently and so grievously shocked us all.

Pe~haps, however, the lack of an extreme

response can point us to a deeper concern: the malaise which currently exists at the Law School and the strange fascination with-and courting of-power by future leaders. To say that a malaise exists which affects the Law School's reaction to Rostow is to believe that at some other time there would have been a more extreme reaction to his return. I think that two years ago, and even last year at the beginning of the McCarthy campaign, a more extreme and negative response to Rostow's return would have occurred. This is not to say that such a response would have been proper or the best tactic, but only that there would have been a much stronger need to react.

The Law School is a microcosm of the liberal community, which rightly or wrongly believes in its most hopeful moments that settling the Vietnam war is no longer an ideological struggle but an administrative issue-or in its sadder moments believes that there is little that can be done to alter the course of the war. Somehow student opposition to Vietnam policy, though probably more

Richard Balzer is a professional photographer. He is also a second-year student at the Yale Law School.

widespread now than ever before, is at its quietest. I don't mean to be hard on my colleagues, but there is little discussion about the war. It is an uncomfortable topic, one which somehow leads nowhere.

Large numbers of students either actively or passively avoid discussing Vietnam.

No matter how removed Rostow was from the decisions, he is popularly seen as a policy-maker who actively supported the Johnson policy. With little remaining appetite for Vietnam, it is not suprising that students seem less than eager to confront one of the policy-makers of the war.

Some students, however, would claim that there is no need for an organized reaction. They contend that if Rostow is ignored he will be a lonely man, a man whom history forgets, a man who will do his thing off in a corner. I think they are wrong. In many ways the former dean is disarmingly warm, engaging and idealistic, and be is a man whom I might have liked under different circumstances. But when he says there hasn't yet been written a defensible piece of opposition to the war, then all my emotional hostility and frustration about Vietnam and its policy-makers returns. Such comments quickly convince one that Rostow is inflexible about the war. He is convinced of his position and his.assumption~ and therefore is willing to engage students and even take the initiative in a discussion of the issue. Like others, I find discussing the war with him nearly impossible. To control one's rage in order to maintain a "rational discussion" is difficult.

More important, however, is that regardless of Rostow's departure from Washington, the policie$ he supported both in his work and even more vivid!y in his recent book, Law, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, will not soon disappear from our foreign relations. The policies he would encourage us to follow may have proved unworkable in Vietnam, but it would be naive to believe that they will soon be abandoned. Statements like the following are not only dangerous but seem likely to remain in the rhetoric of our foreign policy: But the decisive element in American concern about Vietnam is resistance to the bleak. fact with which President Johnson lived every day ¡of his term: the fact that the protection of our national security requires not a sprint, a oneshot effort, followed by the relief of a withdrawal, but a permanent involvement in the politics of every part of the globe, based on a strategy of peace that seeks to achieve order and to make progress possible. (Law, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, p. 55) The Law School's malaise-whatever its causes-only partially explains the response to Rostow. Several students have taken his courses, and at least one student, less timid in his concern and fascination with power, invited him to a dinner party, while others actively seek him out in less formal ways.

Even some of those who abhor his politics would like to understand them better.

Whether it is true or not, people at the Law School believe that they-or at least people they have met there-will someday be powerful. Talk is often heard about this person or that being destined to become a senator. The students at the Yale Law School are on the make and, more than most students, are fascinated with power and powerful people. Whatever his qualities and politics, Eugene Rostow was and may be still a politically powerful person. A number of students could not care less about the substance of his politics.

41 The New Journal I April 13, 1969

They desire, perhaps rightly, to get close to him and find out how decisions are made, how power is utilized.

Whatever popular image the Law School may have at Yale or elsewhere, the school in reality is still geared to the production of lawyers interested in being part of an existing power elite in this country or in creating a new elite.

The majority of students, though more interested than most future lawyers in reform; nevertheless regard themselves as working within existing institutions. A man like Rostow-a basically good man who has worked at a high level and even made some mistakes-is therefore a man who probably can be useful in understanding the mechanisms of the system.

Like the students, the faculty has not responded to Eugene Rostow's return in any extreme or collective manner. The reasons for this have to do both with the relations established between Rostow and faculty members before his departure for Washington and with the amorphous, non-structured nature of the faculty.

It is difficult to understand the faculty's response to Rostow without first recalling his past relations with these men. Rostow was dean of the Yale Law School for a ten-year, two-term period between 1955 and 1965. Almost all faculty members would agree that at least during his first term his combination of idealism, energy and liberalism immeasurably helped expand the Law School and build it into possibly the top law school in the country.

There is some disagreement over how effective his administration was in the second term, particularly the last year or two. Most have mentioned his virtues during this period, though one faculty member has referred to him during these years as a "sycophantish whore." Nevertheless, not only did the faculty give him a banquet on his departure, but the Alumni Association in 1965 awarded him the Annual Merit Award.

Since Rostow returned within two years after taking his leave of absence, under university policies there was no doubt about his reappointment. Now that he is back, there seems to be a marked generation split among the faculty. Older members who remember him as dean remain friendly though possibly less intimate.

Among young faculty members, several of whom were students when he was here, response seems more negative. The least receptive of the young faculty attempt to avoid Rostow: although they don't desire to confront him openly, they want to limit as much as possible their relations with him. An example of this reaction is the response of the faculty to a lunch given for Rostow on February 29th. A number of faculty members found themselves unable to attend because of other commitments.

With very few exceptions, no matter how they feel toward him as a human being, most faculty members say that they don't discuss the war with Rostow.

I believe that they would find such a discussion embarrassing and psychologicaJiy trying and that they would rather avoid the subject. None of the faculty members I talked with had read his book Law, Power and the Pursuit of Peace.

In addition, a number of faculty members have expressed serious doubts about Rostow's performance in faculty meetings.

After a recent meeting between the faculty and the student negotiating team, no fewer than four faculty members approached

one of the student negotiators and apologized for Rostow's behavior.

Some measure of Rostow's inability to deal with issues at the Law School has to do with the peculiar timing of his departure and return. When he left New Haven, the student body was fairly quiet, if not complacent. On returning, Rostow found a very active student body. It is understandable that without seeing the process of change in the student body it would be difficult to understand current issues and pressures in regard to the community, social relevancy, black admissions and grading reform, for example.

On the other hand, much of Rostow's inability to deal with students stems from his attitudes. In his concluding report as dean he said, In small, carefully rationed doses, such calls for university participation in programs of social action may, and sometimes do, contribute to the primary tasks of the faculty.

More often, however, they tend to divert the professoriate from the work which is its special charge-that of fundamental thought.

The universities are uniquely the institutions of society in which minds are encouraged to take high speculative flights, with the benefit of perceptions available only because universities are at one remove from the hydraulic pressures of everyday life and its immediacies. (p. 16) More recently he has stated that he is opposed to quotas and believes the faculty must independently balance the different pressures from student groups.

None of these statements is unusual for a liberal academic administrator, and that may be why they are so troublesome.

Students at this school, like groups elsewhere, are asking institutions to change.

They are attempting to expropriate a type of property-mental property-which for a liberal faculty may be more precious and haro to give up than material possessions.

Eugene Rostow's attitudes clearly exemplify the faculty's hesitancy to change this institution.

In addition, for many years the Law School faculty has prided itself on its independence. They seem to dislike acting as a corporate body and prefer responding to situations and persons as individuals.

They have often justified this stand by saying that it is just such a policy that has protected this school from outside interference and potentially hostile forces opposed to change. The faculty has an extraordinary amount of freedom in choosing courses they wish to teach and in the academic relations they wish to establish with students. However, it is exactly this independence, this desire not to act as a body, that not only bas made the faculty unable to respond to the return of Rostow, if they might have wanted to, but more importantly has made them unable to respond to recent student demands.

In regard to Rostow, of course, this potential paralysis seems unimportant.

Those faculty members who wish to avoid him-and their numbers seem considerable -seem to do so quite easily, and those who wish to continue their relationship with him are in no way hindered. This very style of acting, however, makes it hard if not impossible for the faculty to respond to student issues which are addressed to them as a corporate body.

The faculty has recently been confronted with a series of student demands.

The current second-year class pressed for grading reform a year ago but failed, and this year the issue was pressed again.

There was change that some think considerable. The Black Law Students' Union challenged the faculty to act on the recruitment of black students and faculty members, but no one seems terribly satisfied with the response, including the faculty itself. Similarly, demands from students for an increased role in Law School decision-making have not met with favorable response. "If anything," one senior professor said, "the faculty a nd students have moved further away from community and more toward tactical confrontation than ever before."

These men, who individually seem so capable of creatively responding to situations, seem to lose something when they meet and act collectively. It isn't just that they have different views. When the nature of the group is individualistic and collective meetings are seen as secondary to amorphous functioning, then it is not hard to predict that such a group will have difficulty in dealing with issues put to it collectively.

The faculty's abhorrence of collective action has had a major impact on students.

Subjects such as curriculum, recruitment by employers, Jaw journal work and even institutional reform produce little collective action. Personal ego involvement and career concerns, no matter how sublimated or unconscious, discourage collective activity. The whole atmosphere of the Law School encourages personal response to situations, and students have been no more successful than the faculty in overcoming this barrier.

The quietness of Eugene Rostow's return to the Law School is appropriate, since the school and the man are complementary. The former Under-Secretary represents some of the tragedy of liberalism, while the Law School exemplifies the tragedy of liberal institutions today.

Unfortunately, Rostow is a good man and, from what most say, an idealistic man. But he believes fundamentally in the Vietnam war, and thus demonstrates the horrors good men can produce. More important, his return could serve as a catalyst for the Law School to look at itself.

The students, many of whom are dissatisfied with their education, are nevertheless being trained to accept the boundaries of institutional reform. Many students, therefore, who are as idealistic and as good as Rostow (who considered himself a radical as a student) understand all too well that more likely than not they will end up in similar positions with similar restraints and responsibilities.

The qualities on which the Law School faculty has prided itself are qualities cited for a country emerging from a depression and ttvo wars. Yet today, as many proponents of liberal institutions are discovering, faith in individual responses and in the impact of individuals on an institution is not very persuasive.

The Law School made dramatic changes in the late thirties. The introduction of legal realism and the way it has been used at this school and carried into practice by Yale's graduates have placed this school in its prominent position. But the concepts developed then were ahead of their time; they no longer are. Soon they may be behind the times. The Law School is in need of major changes and probably is illequipped to make them.

Welcome home, Eugene Victor Debs Rostow. 1/11111'

Respectable Bigotry

by Michael Lerner

When white Yale students denounce.the racist university or racist American society, one has little doubt about what they refer to. One also has little doubt about the political leanings of the speaker. He is a good left-liberal or radical, upper-class or schooled in the assumptions of upper-class liberalism.

Liberal-to-radical students use these phrases and feel purged of the bigotry and racism of people such as Chicago's Mayor Daley. No one could be further from bigotry, they seem to believe, than they.

But it isn't so. An extraordinary amount of bigotry on the part of elite, liberal students goes unexamined at Yale and elsewhere. Directed at the lower middle class, it feeds on the unexamined biases of class perspective, the personality predilections of elite radicals and academic disciplines that support their views.

There are certainly exceptions in the liberal-radical university society-people intellectually or actively aware of and opposed to the unexamined prejudice. But their anomaly and lack of success in making an ostensibly introspective community face its own disease is striking.

In general, the bigotry of a lowermiddle-class policeman toward a ghetto black or of a lower-middle-class mayor toward a rioter is not viewed in the same perspective as the bigotry of an uppermiddle-class peace matron toward a lowermiddle-class mayor; or of an upper-class university student toward an Italian, a Pole or a National Guardsman from Cicero, Illinois-that is, if the latter two cases are called bigotry at all. The violence of the ghetto is patronized as it is "understood" and forgiven; the violence of a Cicero racist convinced that Martin Luther King threatens his lawn and house and powerboat is detested without being understood.

Ye~ the two bigotries are very similar. For one thing, each is directed toward the class directly below the resident bigot, the class that reflects the dark side of the bigot's life. Just as the upper-class recognizes in lower-class lace-curtain morality the veiled up-tightness of upper-middle-class life, so the lower-middle-class bigot sees reflected in the lower class the violence, sexuality and poverty which threaten him. The radical may object that he dislikes the lower middle class purely because of its racism and its politics. But that is not sufficient explanation: Polish jokes are devoid of political content.

2 Empirical studies do not show it, but it is my hunch that shortly after negro jokes became impossible in elite circles, the Polish jokes emerged. They enjoy a continuing success in universities even today.

It also happens that while Frank Zappa and the Mothers o{ Invention or Janis Joplin may vie for top position in the hip radical affections, the cellar of their affections-the object of their ample, healthy, appropriate, unneuroticcapacities for hatred-is securely in the hands of that happy team of Mayor Daley and the Chicago Police. Hip radicals in New Haven are often amused by the Italian Anti-Defamation League bumper sticker: "A.I.D.-Americans of Italian Descent."

Poles, Italians, Mayor Daley and the police are safe objects for amusement, derision or hatred. They are all safely lower middle class.

Michael Lerner is a graduate student in political science and a contributing editor.

Part of the vaunted moral development of college activists is their capacity for empathy-their ability to put themselves in the position of the Disadvantaged Other and to see the world from hi~ circumstances. This theore.tically leads them to empathize with ghetto blacks and therefore to distrust the authorities who oppress them. Unnoticed goes the fact that the "authorities" who get hated are the lower-middle-class police, the visible representatives of the more abstract and arnbivalently regarded "power structure."

Other favored targets for confrontation are the National Guard and the military, both bastions of the lower middle class. It is true that Dow Chemical representatives are attacked and that professors and university administrators are sometimes held captive. It is also true that the police, the National Guard and the army are the agents of societal racism, student and ghetto repression and the war in Vietnam.

But all these things should not blind us to the fact the people toward whom bigotry as well as political dislike are directed by upper-class radicals are all too frequently lower middle class.

Radicals gloat over the faulty syntax of the lower middle class with the same predictability that they patronize the ghetto language as "authentic." They delight in Mayor Daley's malapropisms ("Chicago will move on to higher and higher platitudes of achievement") and in the lacecurtain cynicism of his denunciations: "They use language from the bordello, language that would shock any decent person." Why do they patronize one authenticity and mock another?

These upper-class attitudes are not a narrow phenomenon. Time, Life and Newsweek print ghetto phrases in reverent spidery italics-surrounded by space to emphasize the authentic simplicity-beneath soulful pictures of the cleansing butterrible, terrible poverty of ghetto blacks or rural poor. They reprint Daley verbatim as the fool.

3 One of the strongest supports for this upper-class, "respectable" bigotry lies in the academic field of psychology.ln much of what practitioners choose to investigate and interpret, cognitive capacity, moral development and psychodynamic organization of lower middle-class individuals are described as inferior to radical activities. Lower-middle-class people are more "authoritarian," more likely to have "closed" minds, more likely to rely on "law-and-order morality" rather than the more advanced "moral-principle orientation," and more likely to use "massive" ego defenses such as repression instead of the more refined defenses like intellectualization and isolation. Lower-middleclass people are more likely to get stuck in a stage of "concrete cognitive operations" associated with low capacity for intellectual differentiation instead of advancing into "formal cognitive operations" with its high capacity for absttact thinking.

When George Wallace said his opponent was the kind of man who couldn't park a bicycle straight, he undoubtedly confirmed for a h~t of academic observers how concrete and primitive his concept of successful intellectual operations was.

Students in elite universities are described by psychologists as possessing many of the virtues that lower-middleclass-authoritarians lack. These scholars frequently find that among the elite students radical activists have even greater moral and intellectual virtues than classmates from lower-class or more traditional f;tmilies. If you examine the incidence of these virtues, they appear, not surprisingly, to cluster. It seems that psychologists are measuring something that has connected cognitive, moral and ego-defensive manifestations. This something is related to class.

The academic yardsticks measure virtues that, as they are defined, appear most frequently in the children of elite psychologists and their classmates: in the children of the upper-middle and upper class.

These virtues do seem to be the consequence of further (though not necessarily higher) development than the virtues of the lower middle class; that is, one must go through the developmentally prior lower-middle-class virtues to reach the elite virtues. Repression, obedience to law and prompt acceptance of authority are more "primitive" ways of dealing with reality than intellectualization, reflection on principles before obeying a law, and scepticism toward authority. One psychologist has urged that upper-class virtues are better in a Platonic sense than lowermiddle-class virtues. It is revealing that be does not recall that Plato would undoubtedly have restricted the practice of upperclass virtues to the upper class in his city, arguing that in the interest of harmony other virtues must be required of the lower classes.

Should we believe that the psychologists have discovered an empirical basis for distinguishing between more and less developed men? Should we believe that the developed men are superior? We can start with two broad possibilities. Either "further development" is the artifact of class blindness, and upper-class development is merely different from lower-class development; or upper-class development is subsequent to lower class development.

I think the weight of the argument suggests the latter.

whm it~ at,lli!

Everybody knows where it's at. It's at HUNGRY CHARLEY'S where the campus turns on with giant roast beef, hamburger, or Hercules Hero sandwich-CHARLEY'S specialities. Large groups or campus cliques can sit in informal atmosphere and watch the scene over a cool frosty beer. Low prices, great food, and the incrowd all make HUNGRY CHARLEY'S the action spot at Yale. Open til 1 a.m.

r;•·n Austin America

..•

4( $I899POE •~,--'. ~

WI AUTOMATIC TRANS.

·,·:

~ ·.

.·

·-

0

~ ~~

i~

0

•

'-,

,..

.

:;·~~

k~~.-1,-. _.,.-·

•• • • •

(j

if~-

If we opt for this possibility, we must then ask whether the further development is an achievement or a degeneration. Since this depends on our societal values, further choice is required: we can either compare directly the values of the further-developed individual with the formal societal values or we can ask whether the survival of the formal societal values is enhanced by increasing the number of people whose personal values are similar to the formal values of the society.

This question forces us to be more specific about what we mean by the superiority of elite virtues in comparison with the virtues of the lower middle class.

Recent analysts, lacking Plato's grasp of behavioral data and his rigorous empiricism, have been unrealistically idealistic in considering the consequences of changing a class distribution of virtues.

That elite virtues are superior, Plato saw, does not mean that the society would be better or would ev~n survive if all possessed them.

It may be that the lower-middle-class virtues provide operant support for a society that allows the upper class the luxury of elite virtues, much as Greek democracy was built on slave labor. I stress "operant support for American society" rather than "formal support of democracy" because the lower middle class is frequently denounced for disregarding formal democratic values such as regard for due process and for such freedoms as conscience, press, expression and movement.

Those who acclaim the elite radical virtues as superior to the virtues of the lower middle class would appear, if one admits that lower-class virtues provide operant support for American society, to have three alternatives. They can accept the distribution as necessary and good, in which case they espouse a troublesome elitism that cannot be reconciled with their radical views. Or they can argue that everyone should possess these virtues, in which case they are true radicals and should ask themselves whether they have considered in an unbiased light the implications of this position. Or they can do what I think most people do, which is largely to restrict-without admitting or even being conscious of the restrictionthe practice of these superior virtues to the upper class.

The self-serving argument for upperclass hegemony then seems to be that the upper class is more intelligent, more moral and more finely tuned in its ego defenses than the lower class and that this makes it more tit to govern and to preserve such democratic values as equal access. But in the name of the preservation of these values, elite virtues must be denied to the lower class because their use would be disruptive. To preserve the society that guarantees access to power to those who are virtuous, we must deny the possession of virtue to the lower class and thus deny the access we are theoretically preserving.

Leaving aside the hard choices that a believer in the superiority of radical virtues must make, we can ask in broader perspective what alternative stances one may take if it is true that an upper-class background leads to further moral and intellectual development. They appear to be~ 1. In the existing world a "further developed" man may governs worse rather than better. A principled orientation can be disastrous in world politics, as the principled architects of the Cold War have shown. An ability to empathize may lead to concessions in negotiation that will be misread by the Other Side as blanket willingness to retreat when faced with force. Capacity to see issues in all their complexity may lead to Hamletlike paralysis when any action would be preferable to none.

2. The further development of the upper class might make it best qualified to rule, as itsd.e facto supremacy proves.

In a roughly democratic framework there is a chance for the few lower-class individuals who achieve upper-class virtues to rise to the top; that most leaders will be upper class by birth is necessary and even desirable to preserve social stability and to reduce the anxieties that result from situations of volatile status change.

3. Upper-class individuals are further developed than lower-class individuals, and it is an indictment of our resourcerich society that more people. arc not brought into these higher stages of development. Analyses claiming that this would destabilize society are too contingent to win credence; the destabilization, moreover, might result in a better society instead of a worse one.

71 The New Journal I April13, 1969

Yale Uo-op 4. This "further development" is development along a path that may lead to the overspecialization and extinction of the human race. It accepts the dubious values of a capitalist Calvinism and conceals assumptions about what constitutes higher development that are disastrous both for the individual and the species (and are rejected by the hippie culture). This building up of surplus repression in ever higher capacities for intellectualization destroys capacities for feeling, for activity, for love. Elephantiasis of intellect and atrophy of emotion are mirrored in American society, where our intellectual indus- ¡ try, technology, produces the anti-ballistic missile and the death-dealing gadgetry of Vietnam while our feelings are too atrophied to insist that the logic of our priorities is insane. There is the atrophy of individual sensation inherent in watching Johnny Carson, eating Wonder Bread and smelling Right Guard.

These are a few of the attitude-policy alternatives that acceptance of the psychologists' findings could lead us to. The third and fourth arguments, which would appeal to liberals and radicals to varying degrees, have in common a disregard for the contributions of the lower-middleclass virtues to what is good as well as what is bad in American society. Let us now ask whether this disregard is based on close an alysis of what American society would look like if we all possessed the "superior" elite values, or whether it is the result of an upper-class blindness toward what this m ight mean.

Though radicals often condemn American society by juxtaposing the "traditional American virtues" of respect for democratic procedure with current breaches of those procedures, it seems probable that historically American justice was at least as pockmarked as it is today and that the lower-middle-class virtues are the real " traditional" supports that Tocqueville observed when he came to see how American democracy funct ioned.

These virtues-law and order morality, acceptance of authority, cognitive processes that present issues in broad terms, ego defenses that prefer the violence of hockey to the savagery of the seminar table-undoubtedly play a part in whatever orderliness there is in daily American life. They help people accept and carry out decisions that affect them adversely.

They help make football a high-salience issue and foreign affairs a low-salience issue, leaving the President, who should be in a better position to decide, a good ideal of freedom from mass pressures.

In a number of ways, one could argue, they account for what is good as well as bad in American life. Conversely, elite virtues may account for more of the bad aspects of American life than is usually assumed.

Some upper-class radicals, we suggested above, are able to assume that elite virtues are preferable to lower-middle-class virtues across the board because they unconsciously restrict their idea of who should practice these virtues and to what end. Radical students and ghetto blacks, within limits, are the groups from whom these people expect a moral-principle orientation rather than law-and-order morality. Blacks and students are expected to practice scepticism toward authority. If, on the other hand, the colonels, the police, teamsters, longshoremen or garbage collecters practice p~ longed scepticism toward constituted authority or act in accordance with their principles rather than in accordance with law-and-order morality, then the elite semi-radicals have a vague sense that something must be done.

Deansga;te•

The Articulate Plaid Suit

4 Operant supports of American society, conservatives and radicals agree, are very different from the formal democratic virtues that guarantee the procedures of a democratic policy. In the course of a brilliant denunciation of some mandarinic American political scientists, Noam Chomsky quotes de Tocqueville: "I know of no country in which there is so little independence and freedom of mind as in America." Chomsky adds: "Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use-a cynic might say this is why they continue to exist."

The upper class has reached a plateau of security from which its liberal-radical wing believes that it can mock the politics of the policeman and the butcher and slight their aspirations while still living genteely in the space between them. I recaJJ a personal example of how these assumptions sometimes work:

For Spring - buy an educated two-piece plaid that keeps its good manners even on the warmest days. Cool polyesterw¡ool blend, Deansgate tailoring with understated natural shoulder construction. Many colors for your selection.

From $75 open 9 to 5:30 daily Thursday ~til 9 cash or charge and P. R. too!

J

)

NEW SONY MODEL 630: THE TAPE RECORDER THAT'S ALSO A 40-WATT STEREO CONTROL CENTER!

COMPLETE CONTROLS FOR PROFESSIONAL VERSATILITY

A few months ago some black children from the ghetto that is separated from Yale by the old people and students on my street made one of their biannual pilgrimages to Lake Place to break off all the aerials and windshield wipers on the cars. I was much more enraged the next morning about my car than I was about the distant and understandable riots that are filtered to me through the New York Times. I called the police largely, I suspect, because I wanted to be comforted by a typical policeman's observations on what-you-can-expect-fromthose-kids. In my protected Eastern existence I had never passed through an overtly racist stage. But sometimes I suspect I get satisfaction from ¡the racism of others: they can say what I cannot even think, and since their racism is so vulgar, I get to feel superior to them in the bargain.

david dean smith

Examine, on the other hand, the quality of the class-apart empathy radical whites have for ghetto blacks. The radicals are upper-middle-class youths with life histories of intellectual over-control. They have reached a point in their lives where, as Erik Erikson suggests, they can experiment with a little controlled regression-inthe-service-of-the-ego.

The response of a permissive upperclass parent, as reflected in the New York Times, is, "Society may have a great deal to learn from ~he hippies." Translated into jargon this might read: "Upper-class psychological controls may be too strict for changing psycho-sexual-social-historical realities. The young people experimenting with controlled regression may be showing the way in politics, drugs and sex to a new synthesis."

From the point of view of the young people doing the experimenting, the value is diminished if anyone stresses the "controlled" or even experimental nature of their quest. The regression or the liberation from over-control is what matters. To them the lowest class shows-by fact or projective romanticization or both-a life style characterized by open use of the violence, sexuality and drugs that the experimenters find appealing.

Corner of Elm and York

THE NEW HAVEN CHORALE STRAVINSKY "LES NOCES" (The Wedding) DAU.APICCOLA "CANT! DI PRIGIONIA" (Songs of The Prisoner) .

Susan Davenny Wyner, sopr-o Shirley Sudoclc, mezzo-soprano Blake Stun, UntW Philip Treggor, biiiSs

Donald Currier Ward Davenny J ohn Kirkpatrick Francis Whang, pUinists

Gustav Meier, contludtW

WOOLSEY HALL, APRIL 15, 8:30P.M. Tickeu: $4.00, R eserved; $3.00, General Admission; $2.00, Student At: Audio Den, Goldie and Libro, and P. 0. Box 1653, New Haven

Lincoln Fireman's Ball Oratorio for Prague Skiing In Czechoslovakia Tuesday, Stolen Kisses/ Truffaut

The policeman, a likely young Italian, arrived. After surveying the damage he said: "Mr. Lerner, I know how you feel; but you've got to take into account the ¡ kind of environment in which those ch ildren were raised. I mean, if you or I lived in the places they have to live in or went through the same experiences, you can imagine .... "I listened stunned.

Here the man from whom I expected Jawand-order morality was dishing out the moral-principled upper-class capacity to imagine oneself in the situation of the other. Like that of the unconsciously hypocritical radicals, my world depended on that kind of beh avior being reserved for cocktail parties and seminars at which one comments from a discreet distance on the understandability of the behavior of ghetto blacks.

The hatreds do not go one way: ghetto blacks hate policemen, and policemen hate upper-class radicals. One hates one class class up as well as one class down, though the hatred downward is more violent and the h atred upward mixed with aspiration.

The natural alliance is between people a class apart who hate people in the middle for different reasons. This suggests why elite intellectuals, for all their analyzed self-awareness, show immediate "understanding" for the ghetto black's hatred of the policeman yet find police violence directed at a partially upper-class political demonstration a sure sign of incipient fascism.

The authenticity that the experimenters sense in the ghetto derives from the fact that lower-class violence and sexuality are not a consequence of tentafive and strained regression in the service of the ego but represent a normal and stable class pattern deriving from social conditions, tension levels and prevalent primitive egodefense organizations.

When elite intellectuals urge that authentic black life styles not be contaminated by bourgeois values, they are asking that blacks not lose temporarily the values whites lost temp orarily in the process of becoming elite. In other words, the old path is from lower-class under-control to lower-m iddle-class over-control to the upper class luxury of reducing controls again. Upper-class whites like to think blacks can move from under-control to the partial control pattern that they find most socially pleasing without the middle step.

They do not realize partial control is usually a step taken from the strength of a background of increasingly sophisticated and differentiated over-control.

91 The New Journal I April 13, 1969

This self-centered ness is reflected in the programs organized for the education of blacks by upper-class whites and by blacks who have assumed university values.

These programs usually stress a freedom and lack of controls that is appropriate to the fantasies of their organizers but scarcely appropriate to those who have only had ghetto experience. It is no wonder that programs organized by lower-class blacks without the funding and guidance of whites-such as the Black Muslim program for narcotics addicts, and Black Muslim educational programs in general -stress that ghetto people must learn the capacity for tight control that has characterized Mayor Daley and every other individual and group that has competed successfully in American society.

... AND FoR You ··. HEH HcH!

... ACAN OF NEW

F<.£VOLU-(IONAf<Y *!MP~OVED-J<:MAC£!

Since lower-middle-class police are repelled by the uncontrolledness of the lower class from which their families have escaped, they are understandably infuriated by the regression to violence, drugs and sexuality in the class that expects their deference. The radical students and hippies are rejecting the values to which the lower middle class aspires and by which it is able to repress the behavior that the students are flaunting at it. When a Yippie girl pulls up her skirt in front of a lowermiddle-class policeman and tells him that his trouble is that he has not had what she is baring in front of his face, one cannot expect an academically oriented response.

And since every cocktail party psychologist would expect the police to be authoritarian, low in capacity for differentiation a nd scarcely able to maintain through primitive repression the violence il\ himself, why is the reaction to the police riot in C hicago so unbelievably un-understanding? Why do we expect that hippies and radicals and ghetto blacks can experiment with non-restraint while the police must be models of restraint? Why can so few empathize with the frustrations of lower-middle-class life that have led to Chicago, to George Wallace and ultimately to the presidency of Richard Nixon? It is because of the really astounding bigotry and narrowness of a class that prides itself on ridding itself of racism and having a broad perspective. There is little broad perspective in the words of the Times columnist who wrote in shocked tones, 'Those were our children on the streets of Chicago." That Times columnist and the hip radicals did not understand a nation that approved of the police action in Chicago because its children were in the streets of Chicago, too. Its children were the police.

Racism and bigotry toward black people is frighteningly apparent at Yale. But at least the sore has been lanced and lies open. We can be aware of the ugly strains of societal racism still inside ourselves and our institutions, and we can struggle against them.

The hidden, liberal-radical bigotry toward the lower middle class is stinking and covered. When a right-wing Italian announced for Mayor in New York, a brilliant professor in New Haven said , "If • Italians aren't actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I've seen." Everyone at the dinner table laughed. He could not have said that about black people if the subject had been Rap Brown.

The consequences of this bigotry are tragic. It would be less serious if it were not the product of an intellectually selfrighteous class that is trying to provide functioning, electable alternatives to Richard Nixon and George Wallace.

Those dissimilar men had the common intelligence and capacity for empathy-or shrewdness-to appeal to a genuinely forgotten and highly abused segment of the American population. It may be that only when radical intellectuals begin to show again, as they did in the 1930s, empathy for the hardships of lower-middle-class life and begin to integrate the aspirations of that class into their anti-war, antiracism framework, will it be possible to break up the Nixon alliance. Not until the upper middle class learns to deal with its own hidden bigotry will it be in a positio n to help destroy lower-middleclass bigotry as well. filii'

"Best and only after-hours food in the Yale community at reasonable prices" OPEN SANDWICHES

(Rye, White or Pumpernickel)

Rare Eye of the Round Glazed Imported Ham and Swiss Nova Scotia Salmon and Cream Cheese Imported Date Nut Loaf and Cream Cheese Sardines on Toast with Lemon Wedge Italian Anchovies and Sliced Egg All White Meat Tuna Salad Kosher or Italian Salami Yale Cabaret Club Sandwich Cheese Platter with Crackers Black or Red Caviar and Sour Cream PASTRIES AND DESERTS

Assorted Strudel Italian Pastries Fresh Apple Pie with Cheese Wedge or Ice C ream Fruit Tarts C heeseCake Ice Cream Sundae Spumoni Bisque Tortoni Ice Cream Cake Nut Roll

BEVERAGES

Cinnamon Stick Coffee American Style Coffee Cafe Espresso Capucino Royal Espresso Viennese Coffee Mulled Cider with Cinnamon Stick Soft Drinks Deluxe Ice Cream Soda Milk Shakes H ot Tea Green Formosa Oolong Orange Pekoe Darjeeling SOUPS

French Onion with Sherry Soupe du jour

SALADS

Chef Salad Bowl with Turkey and Beef Antipasto ala Cabaret Yale Cabaret Health Salad

NOTE: The terms "r11dical," "semi-radical," "left-liberal" and "liberal-to-radical" are used in referen!='e to "elite," "upper class" and "upper-middle-class' students to refer to a broad but splintered and diverse group of people.

Re-opens April 9 A open Wednesday thru Saturday evenings 9 p.m.-1 a.m. for food and entertainment (2 shows nightly) Membership is open to the Yale Community and to subscribers to the Repertory Theatre. Annual fee $3.00 ($2.00 for Yale students).

Memberships for sale at door, Repertory Theatre box office and the Co-op.

For information call 562-4038 or write Yale Cabaret l903A Yale Station, New H aven, Connecticut, 06520.

Ill

Ill

On Tuesday, March 4, over 1200 students and faculty fi·om the Cambridge community gathered in M.I.T.'s Kresge Auditorium to probe the uses and misuses of scientific research. The day seemed to plod on, and when Harvard biologist George Wald rose to speak, he met a shifting and restless crowd. George Wald, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, is known among Harvard freshmen and sophomores as one of the best lecturers around. As Wald began his extemporaneous talk, his head arched back, and his eyes almost shut. The silence that per· meated the audience was broken only once by tremendous applause, and the end of his talk was met with a long standing ovation.

The Boston Globe decided to reprint the entire text of the speech, calling it "the most important speech given in our time."

The New Yorker reprinted the speech in Talk of the Town, omitting all cartoons from that sectionsomething that has not been done since Adlai Stevenson's eulogy.

~~llof

J

you know that ;n the last couple of

•ears there has been student unrest, breaking at times ' o violence, in many parts of the world: in England, rmany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Japan and, needless ., say, many parts of this country. There has been a gre•t deal of discussion as to what it all means. Perfectly clearly, it means something different in Mexico from what it does in France, and something different in France from what it does in Tokyo, and something different in Tokyo from what it does in this country.

Yet, unless we are to assume that students have gone crazy all over the world or that they have just decided that it's the thing to do, it must have some common meaning.

I don't need to go so far afield to look for that meaning. I am a teacher, and at Harvard I have a class of about three hundred and fifty students-men and women-most of them freshmen and sophomores.

Over the past few years, I have felt increasingly that something is terribly wrong-and this year ever so much more than last. Something has gone sour in teaching and in learning. It's almost as though there were a widespread feeling that education has become irrelevant.

A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize. As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time. I began to feel, particularly this year, that I was missing much of what was coming back. I tried asking the students, but they didn't or couldn't help me very much.

But I think I know what's the matter. I think that this whole generation of students is beset with a profound uneasiness, and I don't think that they have yet quite defined its source. I think I understand the reasons for their uneasiness even better than they do.

What is more, I share their uneasiness.

W.

bothering those students? Somo of them tell you it's the Vietnam war. I think the Vietnam war is the most shameful episode in the whole of American history. The concept of war crimes is an

American invention. We've committed many war crimes in-Vietnam; but I'll tell you something interest· ing about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated. The sat· uration bombing of German cities was a war crime.

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime. If we had lost the war, it might have been our leaders who had to answer for such actions. I've gone through all that hist_o ry lately, and I find that there's a gimmick in it. It isn't written out, but I think we established it by precedent. That gimmick is that if one can allege that one is repelling or retaliating for an aggression, after that everything goes.

And, you see, we are living_in a world in which all wars are wars of defense. All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side. I suppose this is why our ex·S~cretary of State Dean Rusk went to such pains to insist, as he still insists, that in Vietnam we are repelling an aggression. And if that's w ·hat we are doing-so runs the doctrine-everything goes. If the concept of war crimes is ever to mean anything, they will have to be defined as categories of acts, regardless of alleged provocation. But that isn't so now.

I think we've lost that war, as a lot of other people think, too. The Vietnamese have a secret weapon.

It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; y~u may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.

Yet we have come a long way toward it- far enough to sicken many Americans, far enough to sicken even our fig~ting men. Far enough so that our national symbols have gone sour. How t:nany of .you can sing about "the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air" without thinking, Those are our bombs and our rockets, bursting over South Vietnamese villages? When those words were written, we were a people struggling for freedom against oppression. Now we are supporting open or thinly disguised military dictatorships all over the world, helping them to control and repress peoples struggling for their freedom.

But that Vietnam war, shameful and terrible as it is, seems to me only an immediate incident in a much larger and more stubborn situation.

Part of my trouble with students is that almost all the students I teach were born after World War II. Just after World War II, a series of new and abnormal procedures came into American life. We regarded them ·at the time as temporary aberrations. We thought we would get back to normal American life someday.

But those procedures have stayed with us now for more than twenty years, and those students of mine have never known anything else. They think those things are normal. They think that we've always had a Pentagon, that we have always had a big Army, and that we have always had a draft. But those are all new things in American life, and I think that they are incompatible with what America meant before.

How many of you realize that iust before World War II the entire American Army, including the Air Corps, numbered a hundred. and thirty-nine thousand men? Then World War II started, but we weren't yet in it, and, seeing that there was great trouble in the world, we doubled this Army to two hundred and

sixty-eight thousand men. Then, in World War II, it got to be eight million. And then World War II came to an end, and we prepared to go back to a peacetime Army, somewhat as the American Army had always been before. And, indeed, in 195o-you think about 1950, our international commitments, the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, and all the rest of it-in 1950, we got down to six hundred thousand men.

Now we have three and half million men under arms: about six hundred thousand in Vietnam, about three hundred thousand more in "support areas" elsewhere in the Pacific, about two hundred and fifty thousand in Germany, and there ar~ a lot at home.

Some months ago, we were told that three hundred thousand National Guardsmen and two hundred thousand reservists-so half a million men-had been specially trained for riot duty in the cities.

I say the Vietnam war is just an immediate incident because as long as we keep that big an Army, it will always find things to do. If the Vietnam war stopped tomorrow, the chances are that wit~ that big a military establishment we would be in another such adventure, abroad or at home before you knew it.

l t h ; n g to do about the d••ft ;, not to ,.fo,m ;t but to get rid of it.

A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know. All the time I was growing up, I was told about oppressive Central European countries and Russia, where young men were forced into the Army, and I was told what they did about it. They chopped off a finger or shot off a couple of toes or, better still, if they could manage it, they came to this country. And we understood that and sympathized and were glad to welcome them.

Now, by present estimates, from four to six thousand Americans of draft age have left this country for Canada, two .or three thousand more have gone to Europe, and it looks as though many more were pre· paring to emigrate.

A few months ago I received a letter from the Harvard Alumni Bulletin posing a series of questions that students might ask a professor involving what to do about the draft. I was asked to write what I would tell those students. All I had to say to those students was this: If any of them had decided to evade the draft and asked my help, I would help him in any way I could. I would feel as I suppose members of the un· derground railway felt in pre-Civil War days, helping runaway slaves to get to Canada. It wasn't altogether a popular position then; but what do you think of it now?

A bill to stop the draft was recently introduced in the Senate (S. 503), sponsored by a group of senators that ran the gamut from McGovern and Hatfield to Barry Goldwater. I hope it goes through; but any time I find that Barry Goldwater and I are in agreement, that makes me take another look.

And indeed there are choices in getting rid of the draft. I think that when we get rid of the draft, we must also cut back the size of the armed forces. It seems to me that in peacetime a total of one million men is surely enough. If there is an argument for American military forces of more than one million men in peacetime, I should like to hear that argument debated.

There is another thing being said closely connected with this: that to keep an adequate volunteer army,

II one would have to raise the pay considerably. That's said so positively and often that people believe it. I don't think it's true.

The great bulk of our present armed forces are genuine volunteers. Among first-term enlistments, forty-nine percent are true volunteers. Another thirty percent are so-called "reluctant volunteers," persons who volunteer under pressure of the draft. Only twenty-one percent are draftees. All re-enlistments, of course, are true volunteers.

So the great majority of our present armed forces are true volunteers. Whole services are composed entirely of volunteers: the Air Force for example, the Submarine Service, the Marines. That seems like proof to me that present pay rates are adequate. One must add that an Act of Congress in 1967 raised the base pay throughout the services in three installments, the third installment still to come, on April1, 1969. So it is hard to understand why we are being told that to maintain adequate armed services on a volunteer basis will require large increases in pay; they will cost an extra seventeen billion dollars per year. It seems plain to me that we can get all the armed forces we need as volunteers, and at present rates of pay.

Yet there is something ever so much bigger and more important than the draft. That bigger thing, of course, is the militarization of our country. Ex-President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned us of what he called the military-industrial complex. I am sad to say that we must begin to think of it now as the military-industrial-labor-union complex. What happened under the plea of the Cold War was not alone that we built up the first big peacetime Army in our history but that we institutionalized it. We built, I suppose, the biggest government building in our history to run it, and we institutionalized it.

I don't think we can live with the present military establishment and its eighty-billion-dollar-a-year budget and keep America anything like the America we have known in the past. It is corrupting the life of the whole country. It is buying up everything in sight: industries, banks, investors, scientists-and lately it seems also to have bought up the labor unions.

I

Defenoe Department ;, alway• b<oke, but some of the things it does with that eighty billion dollars a year would make Buck Rogers envious. For example, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, on the outskirts of Denver, was manufacturing a deadly nerve poison on such a scale that there was a problem of waste disposal. Nothing daunted, the people there dug a tunnel two miles deep under Denver, into which they have injected so much poisoned water that, beginning a couple of years ago, Denver has experienced a series of earth tremors of increasing severity. Now there is grave fear of a major earthquake. An interesting debate is in progress as to whether Denver will be safer if that lake of poisoned water is removed or is left in place.

Perhaps you have read also of those six thousand sheep that suddenly died in Skull Valley, Utah, killed by another nerve poison-a strange and, I believe, still unexplained accident, since the nearest testing seems to have been thirty miles away.

As for Vietnam, the expenditure of firepower there has been frightening . Some of you may still remember Khe Sanh, a hamlet just south of the Demilitarized Zone, where a force of United States Marines was

II

I

beleaguered for a time. During that period, we dropped on the perimeter of Khe Sanh more explosives than fell on Japan throughout World War II, and more than fell on the whole of Europe during the years 1942 and 1943.

One of the officers there was quoted as having said afterward, ' It looks like the world caught smallpox and died."

The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life. Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the busines.s of killing and being killed. So-called defense now absorbs sixty percent of the national budget, and about twelve percent of the Gross National Product.

~~

j l;voly debate;, beg;nn;ng aga;n on whether or not we should deploy antiballistic mis· siles, the ABM. I don't have to talk about them-everyone else here is doing that. But I should like to mention a curious circumstance. In September, 1967, or about a year and a half ago, we had a meeting of M.I.T. and Harvard people, including experts on these matters, to talk about whether anything could be done to block the Sentinel system-the deployment of ABMs. Everyone present thought them undesirable but a few of the most knowledgeable persons took what seemed to be the practical view: "Why fight about a dead issue? It has been decided, the funds have been appropriated. Let's go from there."

Well, fortunately, it's not a dead issue.

An ABM is a nuclear weapon. It takes a nuclear weapon to stop a nuclear weapon. And our concern must be with the whole issue of nuclear weapons.

There is an entire semantics ready to deal with the sort of thing I am about to say. It involves such phrases as "those are the facts of life." No-these are the facts of death. I don't accept them, and I advise you not to accept them. We are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled-decisions that have been made. Always there is the thought: Let's go on from there. But this time we don't see how to go on. We will have to stick with these issues.

We are told that the United States and Russia, between them, by now have stockpiled nuclear weapons of approximately the explosive power of fifteen tons of TNT for every man, woman and child on earth. And now it is suggested that we must make more. All very regrettable, of course, but "those are the facts of life." We really would like to disarm, but our new Secretary of Defense has made the ingenious proposal that now is the time to greatly increase our nuclear armaments, so that we can disarm from a position of strength.

I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack. It is both easier and cheaper to circumvent any known nuclear-defense system than to provide it. It's all pretty crazy. At the very moment we talk of deploying ABMs, we are also building the MIRV, the weapon to circumvent ABMs. As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of American who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million. We have become callous to gruesome statistics, and this seems at first to be only another gruesome statistic. You think, Bang!-and next morning, if you're still there, you

I

Ill

read in the newspapers that fifty million people were killed.

But that isn't the way it happens. When we killed close to two hundred thousand people with those first, little, old-fashioned uranium bombs that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about the same number of persons were maimed, blinded, burned, poisoned and otherwise doomed. A lot of them took a long time to die.

That's the way it would be. Not a bang and a certain number of corpses to bury, but a nation filled with millions of helpless, maimed, tortured and doomed persons, and the survivors huddled with their families in shelters, with guns ready to fight off their neighbors trying to get some uncontaminated food and water.

A few months ago, Senator Richard Russell, of Georgia, ended a speech in the Senate with the words "If we have to start over again with another Adam and Eve, I want them to be Americans; and I want them on this continent and not in Europe." That was a United States senator making a patriotic speech.

Well, here is a Nobel laureate who thinks that those words are criminally insane.

How real is the threat of full-scale nuclear war? I have my own very inexpert idea, but, realizing how little I know and fearful that I may be a little paranoid on this subject, I take every opportunity to ask reputed experts. I asked that question of a distinguished professor of government at Harvard about a month ago. I asked him what sort of odds he would lay on the possibility of full-scale nuclear war within the foreseeable future. "Oh," he said comfortably, "I think I can give you a pretty good answer to that question. I estimate the probability of full-scale nuclear war, provided that the situation remains about as it is now, at two percent per year." Anybody can do the simple calculation that shows that two percent per year means that chance of having that full-scale nuclear war by 1990 is about one in three, and by 2000 it is about fifty-fifty.

M

tMnk I know what ;, bothering tho otudonh. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.

I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me. But there are those students of mine, who are in my mind always; and there are my children, the youngest of them now seven and nine, whose future is infinitely more precious to me than my own. So it isn't just their generation; it's mine, too.

We're all in it together.

Are we to have a chance to live? We don't ask for prosperity or security. Only for a reasonable chance to live, to work out our destiny in peace and decency.

Not to go down in history as the apocalyptic gen· eration.

And it isn't only nuclear war. Another overwhelming threat is in the population explosion. That has not yet even begun to come under control. There is every indication that the world population will double before the year 2000, and there is widespre•d expectation of famine on an unprecedented sc•le in many p~rts of the world. The experts tend to differ only in their estimates of when those famines will begin. Some think by 1980; others think they can be staved off until 1990; very few expect th•t they will not occur by the year 2000.

12 1T he New Journal I Aprill 3, 1969

That is the problem. Unless we can be surer than we now are that this gener11tion has a future, nothing else matters. It's not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with bre11kfast foods, to buy it expensive educ11tions. Those things don't mean anything unless this generation h111 11 futu re . And we're not sure that it does.

I don't think that there 11re problems of youth, or student proble ms. All the re11l problems I know about 11re grown-up problems.

' - P • you wUI th;nk me eltogethe• ebsunl, or " acade mic," or hopelessly innoce nt- that is, until you think of the 11lternative s-if I s11y, as I do to you now: We have to ge t rid of those nuclear we11pons.

There is nothing worth h11ving that can be obt11ined by nuclear war-nothing m11terial or ideological-no tr•ditlon that it c11n defend. It is utte rly self-defeating.

Those atomic bombs represent 11n unusable weapon.

The only use for a n 11tomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no protection, only the doubtful s11tisfaction of retaliation. Nuclear we11pons offer us nothing but 11 bal11nce of terror, and a b11lance of terror is still terror.

We have h11ve to get rid of those atomic weapons, here and everywhere. We c11nno~ live with them.

I think we' ve reached a point of great decision, not just for our nation, not only for all humanity, but for life upon the e11rth. I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will s hare, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that m11ke up ninety-nine per cent of our living subst11nce were cooked in the deep interiors of e11rlier gener11tions of dying st~~rs.

Gathe red up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventu11lly they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its pl11nets, and ourselves.

Three billion ye11rs ago, life 11rose upon the earth. It is the only life in the sol11r system. Many a star hilS since been born 11nd died.

About two million ye•rs 11go, man appeared. He h11s become the domin•nt species on the e 11rth. All other living things, 11nimal 11nd plant, live by his suffer•nce. He is the custodi11n of life on e11rth 11nd in the solar system. It's 11 big responsibility.

The thought th11t we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all11 mist•ke, and trivi11l. We are one species, with • world to win. There's life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, 11nd in the whole universe we 11re the only men.

Our business is with life, not de•th. Our ch11llenge is to give wh11t account we c11n of wh11t becomes of life in the sol11r system, this comer of the universe th11t is our home; 11nd, most of all, what becomes of men-all men, of all nations, colors and creeds. This has become one world, a world for all men. It is only such a world that c11n now offer us life, and the chance to go on. 1f11111

Friday, April1 1

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA (1959) Starring Monica Vitti Caused a riot at the Cannes Film Festival

Saturday, April 12

A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967) Directed by Charles Chapl in Starring Ma rron Brando and Sophia Loren Pa nne d una nimously by Anglo-Ame rican c ritics

Tuesday, April 15

J ean-Luc Godard's LES CARABINIERS (1963) New Haven P remiere. P robably De rniere.

Wednesday, April16

.Friday, April1 8

D. W. Griffith's TRUE HEART SUSIE (1919) D. W. stands fo r David Wark Francois Truttaut 's THE 400 BLOWS (1959) With t he new STOLEN KISSES lets you see J ean-Pie rre Leaud in lyric befo re a nd after

Saturday, April19

FORT APACHE (1948) Ford, Wayne, Fo nda ...

Tues da y, April 22

Robert Bresson's PICKPOCKET (1959) Perhaps one of Fra nce's best

13 I The New Journal I April13, 1969

Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding; The Free Press, 218 pages.

)

Moynjhan's â&#x20AC;˘

maxunum misunderstanding

by Michael Parenti

One can discern in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding the outlines of an old-fashioned morality drama. The villains in this history of the anti-poverty program are the "liberal-radical reformers" who, Moynihan tells us, presume to know what ails society, and who superimpose their own values on the poor. How do they do this? By assuming that the poor have the best understanding of "their problems and accordingly should be given the power to make dec iss ions about it [sic]." If I understand Moynihan, reformers who encourage the poor to determine their own destiny are exercising an arrogant elitist directiveness!

It is Moynihan's own view that only the established institutions can properly fight the war on poverty. (Yet he does not thereby consider himself guilty of elitist superimposition.) He believes the poor lack the virtues necessary for proper political participation. Their involvement tends to be a disruptive influence; furthermore, he says, "It may be that the poor are never 'ready' to assume power in an advanced society: the exercise of power in an effective manner is an ability acquired through apprenticeship and seasoning."

I disagree. In my own direct contact with black communities in Newark, New York and New Haven, I have been impressed repeatedly by the leadership abilities displayed by various elements among the black poor. If in fact their endeavors and their dramatizations often prove futile, it is not because they lack skills and seasoning but because they Jack power. ¡ Moynihan asserts that the ghetto residents were never particularly interested in the war on poverty; he cites the light turnout for the various community board elections as evidence of apathy. But one striking characteristic of the dispossessed is their understandable suspicion that the ballot box rarely brings changes in their life conditions and that those who accede to office have little regard for their plight.

Their electoral non-participation, then, is born more often of defeatism and cynicism than of apathy. Writing in 1968 as if the riots of 1967 had never occurred, Moynihan has yet to learn the difference between apathy and alienation.

Nowhere in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding do the poor themselves make an appearance. Their views, hopes and grievances are never once heard, and no attention is given to the problems they face. To conclude that Moynihan possesses, at best, only a limited second-hand understanding of the world of the black poor is inevitable. He ignores the ample evidence unearthed by investigators like Studs Terkel and Paul Jacobs, who point out that most black families are headed by hard-working, self-respecting, responsible parents who Jove and care for their children and who are victimized not by a lack of proper "motivation" but by long work hours, substandard wages, underemployment, job discrimination, deteriorating housing conditions, rent-gorging landlords, shoddy overpriced goods, police brutality, a punitive and degrading welfare system, lack of recreational facilities, and abominable schools and hospitals. In

Michael Parenti is a political scientist and author of The Anti-Communist Impulse, which will be published by Random House this fall.

short, the major causes of their misery and low morale can be found in the mistreatment and exploitation accorded them by the socio-economic system.

Moynihan has nothing to say about systemic injustices; rather, he seems to fall back on those fanciful studies which conclude that "the sources of gang delinquency lie in the early socialization of male children in a lower class matriarchal home." He prefers the earlier Mobilization for Youth (MFY) program which was "a promising device" to "solve the private difficulties" of youth. For him it is not the system, but the victims of the system that need to shape up.

If trouble comes to the system, it must be because outside agitators, in this case "OEO guerillas," "ADA intellectuals" and "MFY theorists," arouse the placid poor, hoping to throw America "into the kind of chaos out of which revolutionary situations are made." Sounding not so very unlike George Wallace, he alludes to "the various forms of public disorder either sanctioned, induced or Jed by middle-class liberal-radicals," a statement that will come as a surprise to the ghetto blacks who had no idea whitey was behind all the arson and looting.

In Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding Moynihan has the unbecoming habit of caricaturing other people's motives, thereby avoiding the necessity of having to confront their arguments. The MFY dedication to lower-class participation, for example, is at one point sarcastically dismissed as a product of the "changing fashion in ideas," "the 'thing' for the 1960s."

In one curious outburst he charges: "Social scientists love poor people. They also get along fine with rich people. (Not a few are wealthy themselves, or married to heiresses....) But, alas, they do not have much time for the people in between ... [and] little sympathy with the de~ ire for order, and anxiety about change, that are commonly enough encountered among working-class and lower-middle-class persons." As if this were not enough, he claims there exists a rich-poor conspiracy against the virtuous lower-middle strata, an "elite-proletat :an axis" with elite journalists controlli. g the mass media and propagating "th., romanticization of the proletariat."

The only sub.. tantive programmatic suggestion he proffers in this book betrays his own maximum misunderstanding of ghetto sentimenâ&#x20AC;˘s. Why, he asks with all apparent seriou~ness, were poverty funds not used to "support and expand the activities of the small fundamentalist churches of the Negro community and the Pentacostal sects of the Puerto Ricans?"

After aU, these are the only truly indigenous slum institutions. Is it that "hymnshouting and bible-thumping somehow does not e licit in the fancies of the white radical quite the same fascinations as does the black demi-monde?" Mmm, yes, Pat, that must be it.

Moynihan cannot understand why anyone might think that the established political organizations "were somehow not meeting the needs of the people." He does not realize that slum dwellers do not share his highly romanticized and largely inaccurate picture of the beneficence of Tammany Hall. He himself points out that machine politicians like Daley of Chicago and Addonizio of Newark used every pressure at their command to prevent the poor from controUing community programs.

But he never suggests that the political bosses exercise some of the seasoned flex-

XEROX COPIES ON YOUR MIND?

The Vale Symphony Orchestra A

I

•

tJ

under the diredion of John F. Mauceri presents

...----........

,. p·'·~ t!f?p It r ,. ~~ r ~p· p1 l ~ g~lti Ib~f~ ~~ E ~ .c1 ~ ~

Wagner: TRISTAN, prelude and concert ending (New Haven Premiere) Bruckner: SYMPHONY No. 9 (1896)

Saturday, April 12,1959 at Woolsey Hall

~= ~~

~~

IYfl ~

Admission: Free

~ 1.~

continued from page 2

April 14: We Are All Murderers directed by Andre Cayatee Apri121: Black Orpheus directed by Marcel Camus Showings at 3:30,7, 9, and (admission: 7 5¢)

ibility and restraint which he demands of the poor. Once more his sympathies are with the victimizers rather than the victims. If City HaJI acts with power-hungry, bullying intent toward the protestors, well, that's the name of the game. One should " not complain when bashed," and the agitators have only themselves to blame "when the animal defended itself." "The Left has much to answer for in American life," he admonishes, "and not least for having brought about a too ready rejection by men of the center of any assertion of proletarian cohesion and purpose." Less agile minds would think that the men of the center might occasionally be made to answer for their own beh avior.Indeed, the poor can be held accountable because they are weak, but how do we hold the established institutional power-wielders responsible for their actions?

Moynihan evades other questions: How do the powerless effect changes in a system that responds only to power? And how do they achieve power when they are denied access to the resources that determine power? He seems to imply that there is a non-political, non-controversial, technocratic way of reallocating resources and bringing about substantive changes, but he does not reveal wh at it is or how it might be effected. His real concern seems to be th at others be kept from causing conflict within the system.

So Daniel Patrick Moynihan once more shows himself to be the well-publicized social critic who manages never to antagon ize those who preside over the corporate, financial , educational and political institutions of our nation. Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding does not live up to the pre-publication attention it received. Written in a hurried, evasive style, it offers a superficial and essentially second-hand account-much of it taken from the New York Times-of the origin and outcome of the anti-poverty program. According to the author, the poverty program was planned in confusion and soon became the captive of those who used the "maximum feasible participation" clause to lead the poor into fruitless confrontations with the powers that be. The end result was a defeat for the war on poverty.

In a recent article Marilyn Mercer noted that the educated money in Washington thinks that fighting-liberal-intellectual Pat Moynihan will not last more than six months with the Nixon Administration. My money says Dick and Pat will get along beautifully. filii'

Opera

I I

p.m.

April 28: The Bicycle Thief directed by Vittorio de Sica May 5: The Pawnbroker directed by Sidney Lumet with Rod Steiger (admission: 75¢) MondayNightsat7 and 9:30 IOI Linsly-Chittenden Membership: 50¢/Admission: 50¢

The ordeal of obtaining tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York is one that many Yalies go through several times a year: writing for tickets, having the check returned with a "sorry, sold out" note, then going down to Lincoln Center to wait in line for hours to obtain some of the precious few tickets reserved for box office sale.

Things may be easier next year. A group of students is presently working with the M et to reconstitute the Yale Opera Society, which until its demise about ten years ago owned a box of eight seats in the opera house. The society, beginning in September, plans to reserve a similar box for either ten or twenty performances spread throughout the season. It will then operate as a ticket service, reselling the total of 80 or 160 seats to members.

Membership will be open to all Yale College students, graduate students and faculty members. A modest registration fee will be charged to cover administrative expenses; seats will then be sold at box office prices. Members will receiv~ the season schedule in September and will draw lots for ticket preference if the dem and for one particular opera exceeds th e society's ticket supply.

The box will probably be secured for Saturday m atinee performances. Final choice o(day, however, and the number of performances will be arranged with the Metropolitan depending upon the size of the society's membersh ip. So that this demand can be determined and final arrangements made before the Met's late-April deadline, it is asked that all those considering membership write immediately to Yale Opera Society, c/o Box 11, Yale Station. Each potential member should indicate preference for matinee or evening performances and include an estimate of the number of performances he is interested in attending.

Depending upon the location of the box, and whether society members request a matinee or an even ing opera series, ticket prices will range from $1 1.50 to $13.50.

Paul Goldberger

Flying Saucer Two old books, a new book, a bandpainted tie from Rosenberg's, some French term papers, a tr ack shoe, a shoe horn-all stuffed in a large brown paper grocery bag. Of course we weren't expecting any success; nevertheless our intent was to set out from the Old Campus to barter them for two movie tickets. We were indulging in a bit of deviance for a course of the same name given by the sociology department.

"Two tickets?" In the middle of her life, the lady at Loew's greets patrons with pointed nose and cold stare. She gave us two tickets and we gave her the necktie.

She said "That'll be two dolJars," and we said "Wouldn't you like Roger Bannister's track shoe?"

"Don't bother me," she countered as she cautiously closed the money bole in the glass window. "Go next door to the College Street Cinema."

"But 1 don't think I can do this." She was young, blond-pretty, confused and indeed embarassed. "People like you?

What are you doing this for?"

"To see the show," we responded. She stared for a while before taking up the phone to caJJ the manager. There are two students here, she was saying, and they seem to h ave a "misunderstanding."

When she had finally shunted responsibility for us from her~lf to the unseen manager, her manner was distinctly more relaxed. " Will you wait? The manager will be here in a moment." We asked if she were a student, for we had some excellent term papers to trade. No, she wasn't a student.

And her fr iends, the ticket-taker and the popcorn girl who were now peering at us from behind the corner awaiting the confro ntatio n, were they students? No, and they couldn't read French. By this time the m anager and his lackey were approaching with a gait that told us we would lose. We left.

The Crown Street Theater we expected to be somewhat more understanding.

"Th ese are valuable to you and maybe to me, but I have no right to accept these

•

15 1The New Journal! April13, 1969

things. It isn't my theatre and the owner is away." As she said this the ticket lady nestled the phone in her breast cleft. Deprived of ownership, she realized she was forced to deal with us through the impersonal exchange of money. We were thinking she might make a good incipient Marxist when we heard her resume her telephone conversation as we walked away: "Now you know what I have to deal with in this weird neighborhood. Did you hear that?"

Across the lonely, wind-swept reaches of the Oak Street Connector we journeyed to the last outpost of impropiety, therecently-renovated Princess Theatre, which symbolically stands next to the HiJI Redevelopment Office on Davenport Avenue.

On the way, however, across from the Child Study Center, we noticed a plain storefront added to the white frame house of the 1880s, typical for that part of the Hill. In front, the unobtrusive sign read "Mideastern-American Food." The Samera Restaurant. We went up to the wooden porch and, with a common hint of understanding, opened the door.

On the left was a dimly lit dining room closed off for the afternoon. On the right was a small luncheon counter, diminutive even for the small room. Behind the counter stood a short, square body dressed in culinary white and a face squared by grizzled hair.

"So what you want, boys?"

"We hear you barter in the Mideast."

"Ah, yes, we still do that there, but not here in this country."

"We couldn't trade for some food?"

"As I say, we don't barter here in the United States-" already, though, he had reached for one of my books, "-but what do you have?"

I quickly put into his hand a volume of Josephus: Boston, 1823. "This is a history of the Jews written in the First Century A.D.," I began to explain as he pored over the d ate and the engravings. " I am not a Jew, but we read the Scripture too, you know. What do you want for it?" Short pause.

"A salad?"

"Good. And what's this?" He was already paging through Mark Twain, an 1897 edition. "I think I will take this too."

He then turned to my friend, who was searching through the bag to produce the new book, Mathematics, Computers and Soviet Economy. "I will take this too, and for these three books what do you want?"

But before we could answer, "I will give you each a flying saucer and a salad," he said hurriedly. (As the Italians have submarines, he later explained, he has flying saucers.)

"And Arab bread and that dip that goes with it?" I asked meekly.

"That too."

Shia was his name, a variant of Isaiah.

Sam Shia. He was a lover of books, he explained as we dipped the saucer-shaped bread into a thick vegetable oil. His grandfather had translated manuscripts for _Schliemann of Troy. The salad was filled with chopped mint.

"I was born in Mesopotamia, but later my family moved to Lebanon." He spoke of the persecution of his Christian family by the Kurds of the northeastern highlands. Ne~ertheless, despite his move to Lebanon and later to the United States, he was still Syrian. Our teeth, meanwhile, were tearing at the be.e f and lamb that was mashed and packed together with spices and tucked into the bread.

Sam had other customers as well but took care to sit and talk when time allowed. Retsina wine he did not have-no license- but coffee, milk, coke he did have.

And did we want dessert? We declined; it was mid-afternoon and the Yale lunch was too much with us. As we rose to leave he promised a full dinner if we brought our own wine.

Mike Deasy

Classifieds 20¢per word Ads may be mailed to: Classifieds, The New Journal, 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut, 06520.

4,000 women applied for admission to Yale College, but who got in? The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, April13 .

News Leak of the Year: before a bank of television cameras Melvin Laird, our Secretary of Defense, referred to the USSR as the Soviet Urine.

LBJ's dwarf alter-ego is running for the democratic nomination for mayor of New York.

"The Story of King Lear and His Daughters"

by William Shakespeare, Nahum Tate and others will be performed by the Silliman Dramat Thursday through Saturday at 8:30, Matinee Saturday at 2:30. Attic over entryway "L". Admission free.

To readers: please read the above classified.

Thanks-The Silliman Dramat.

Ken Jenkins and Jerome Raphel in "Under Milk Wood" · Photo: Maurice Breslow

OO~[ID[g[Ri ~~[L~

W®®OO

BY DYLAN THOMAS

Aprii4-April26, 1969 The play, written in lyric prose, concerns the impressions of residents of Llareggub, a Welsh Village situated under Milk Wood, on a day in spring. The play is· considered a landmark in modern drama for it remains one of the few truly successful poetic theatre masterpieces of the twentieth .century.

222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. Exit 46, Connecticut Turnpike Tickets available NOW at Yale Co-op Long Wharf Theatre box oHice: 787-4282

Sterling conversation and even more prococative bathrooms: Ham and Eggs, 71st and Columbus.

Need lift to Kansas. May 28-29. 562-4536.

Faith Nickel.

WDDIM? Annual Brandeis Book Sale: texts, novels, plays, poetry, etc. Sunday, April 13th-April 2th. 32 Whitney A venue, 10 AM- 5PM Custom-made sandals, moccasins, etc. 1335 Chapel St. France, have a gary merry Christmas, S.S. Desired: Personable, talented, young female singer for summer work.... 772-1729 PMCC

OUR UNIVERSITY SHOP VESTED SUIT MAKES ITS SPRING APPEARANCE IN MANY LIGHTWEIGHT SUITINGS It's S.F.A's classic naturalshoulder suit with plain-front trousers, center vent jacket and vest. Now ready for spring in polyester-and-wool blends thai combine lightness with· good looks. There's a wide range of pa:l:ferns and colors io choose from, including plaids, ±wills, stripes and solid colors. In ian or navy, plus ±ones of grey, blue and olive.

In a complete range of sizes, sgo and S95. From our University Shop.

THE UNIVERSITY SHOP

SAKS FIFTH AVENUE 290 York Street, New Haven Yal e • Pronceton • Harvard • Un oversoty of MochoKan • Stanford • New York • Whole Plaons • Sproncfoeld Carden Coty • Washoncton • Atlanta • Ft. La uderda l e • Ch ocaKO • Skokoe • Oetroot · Troy • Phoenox

THE HILLHOlJSE BOOM top (12th Floor) Kline Biology Tower Lunch & Dinner

Special $1.75 dinner every night Also nightly Steaks Roast Beef Shrimp Benjamin Shish-ka- bo b Chicken Livers Saut e Sandwiches And much, much more. cafeteria 9 -1:30 dinner 5:30-7:30

April22

Discuss·on

Reading

All the particopants will - -Ilona 2:30 pm FOMd t..ow.oa Call>oun College

Jl>dith SM<win

A Gathering George Starbuck of 0 s

1-YalaYO<Ifl9e< Poet 4:30 pm Fe>o<d Lounge Calhoun

•

ven1ng lnfOtm.. r.e<tinga and conw-efuttOn

Cot'-

Sandra . Hochman

ral,....,_,ta -

m uolc:

t pm M..t..-s HouM Ca lhoun Coli-

James Tate

llponoOt-.l by tile Yale Uni--'IY Pr-C.-Collage with poete . . - - b y DudleY Fl"• •YolaY--Poets

--14'*--

1ft,-...-

-rolf.

MR. w. a.

~a with

at..,ley Kunltz,

Oeollray Ha rtmen Louis M41ttz.

~.

Peter Davison

Judith Sherwin

Helen Chasin

Alan Dugan